Yeah, I KNOW already!!!!  It’s almost a whole frickin’ month since February 14. The dog ate my Blogpost alright?  Get over it (we don’t even have a dog)! As underwhelming as this post may seem, given the date, Happy Oregon’s 162nd Birthday anyway!  I just wanted you to know we celebrated and why.   I try my hardest to take every occasion possible to tell those I love how much they mean to me and V-Day is an occasion.  2-14, I arose while the love of my life was still sleeping and fixed her favorite breakfast.  I almost got it to her before she got out of bed!  It was a “bull’s eye,” a piece of bread with a hole punched out of the center.  You fry the bread in a frying pan breaking an egg into the hole at some point, flipping it a few times until you get the egg just right, you know, with the yoke mostly hard with just a tad of runny-ness.  For Oregon’s Birthday/Valentine’s day, I made the hole in the shape of a heart and carved the piece of bread in the shape of Oregon.  You have to admit, it looks delicious, right?  Even 28 days into Oregon’s 163rd year, I remember it was tasty!

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog for awhile, you may remember that our daughter Erin and I have a thing about Oregon’s Birthday.  We started celebrating it with V-Day when she was small, usually making some kind of cake in the shape of our 33rd State, well, maybe except when we lived in Idaho!?! So confusing.  Anyway, these days, I do my best to keep the tradition going and occasionally, Debbie and I will take the Oregon cake to Erin’s math classroom at school where she will usually choose to share it with the high school/middle school children who will be polite if we are actually present in the classroom and pretend they care about Oregon.  Whatever their attitude they can usually tolerate the chocolate.

Over the years of Erin’s adulthood, I have often taken my design from the Oregon Atlas. So, one year it might be a topo map with Oregon’s mountains, canyons, plains and high deserts decked out appropriately in the correct topographical color of frosting.  Sometimes it’s been a map of roads, rivers or watersheds in multi-colored sweetness painted on a wondrous sheet of brownies.  In 2019, on Oregon’s 160th, I replicated the map of all the existing tribes and where they lived across the Oregon Territory at Statehood in 1859.  Considering how their territory had shrunk just a few years later, that cake was much harder to swallow.  I found myself in a similar mood February 14, 2021, as I considered my baking options.  What kind of cake would be appropriate after a week of faithfully watching T***p’s 2nd impeachment trial?  I was gripped, brought to tears, sickened, scared and saddened by the testimony of the Impeachment Managers from the House of Representatives.  We watched the footage of films from January 6 as the picture of what happened that violent Day of Epiphany became abundantly more clear with each presentation.  We struggled to keep our meals down as the Defense shared their cowardly ruse for the Republicans.  We heard each Senator cast their vote.  We struggled to understand what Mitch McConnell was actually saying as, once again, he tried to explain away his violent hypocrisy in the speech he gave right after he voted to acquit the Inciter-In-Chief!   Though we were angered, dismayed and resigned to the expected acquittal, we were also lifted and energized that the real story was carefully told to anyone who would listen and the 57-43 vote was the most bipartisan vote ever in an impeachment trial.  The seven Republicans who put their moralities and political futures on the line and voted to convict, might be our inspiration as we, with guarded hope, once again embark troubled waters.

The matter of Oregon’s statehood came up in Congress February, 1858. Southerners opposed a new free state unless Kansas was added as a slave state. Some northerners opposed the ban on free blacks. When Oregon entered the Union February 14, 1859 it did so as a ‘whites-only’ state, the only free state to do so.   When my own family invaded Oregon in 1853, on the Oregon Trail, we took land, occupied for centuries by the Kalapuyans and their forebears as if it were entitled to us in one of Oregon’s Doctrines of Discovery, The Donation Land Claim Act.  It was the language of that government act that put our white supremacy into law.

It’s one of the reasons I wanted to go ahead and post this blog a month late.  Keeping a memory of those enlightened and still often racist proceedings of that week, we realized how far we have come and yet how very far we have to go.  To date, we have seen and heard our former President repeat his mantra dozens of times. “Stand back and stand by,” is the slogan quickly adopted by the Proud Boys after T***p used it in the debate with President Biden.  I don’t want to push their hate-filled reality out of my mind too quickly.  They need to be permanently parked alongside the violence of the Holocaust, Indian Boarding Schools and Jim Crow in our most vivid memory until they become our truth and reconciliation give or take a century from now.   In fact, 28 days ago, on my own State’s birthday, I wanted us to make that mantra our own.   At the time, I wanted to recognize the 7 Republicans who added their votes to the impeachment as at least temporary heroes.  As it turns out, that’s exactly what they were…temporary.  None of them could muster the courage to vote for the COVID Relief package just about to be signed by President Biden.  Thank you, Democrats!!!  If you still can’t believe I posted the February 14 blog a month late, consider this:  I was born 3 weeks pre-mature on July 18, 1949.  If you ask my family, they will tell you that was the last time I was early to anything!  But here’s the thing: no matter what month or millenium, WORDS MATTER.  And you matter.  And anyway, I’m still nibbling on that cake.  And I’ve made the INCITER-IN-CHIEF’s words our mantra:  Stand back HATE.  Stand by LOVE.  Stand as ONE.