Good bye, dear Portland until next year. This visit was bittersweet. Dear friends whom I’ve visited in Portland for twenty years are moving to Albuquerque. They are so popular and so loved that they’ll need  a witness protection program to keep all their friends from visiting them. It won’t stop me. One of the highlights was visiting a friend I hadn’t seen in forty years. He and his wife have moved to Gearhart, Or. It’s on the majestic Pacific Ocean. We walked for miles, well, five, on the beach, barefoot and dipping into the oncoming tide. Afterwards, a delicious meal cooked by my friend. Like his late father he’s an amazing cook. I stayed where I’ve stayed for the past three years: The Inn at Northrup Station. Was it designed by Freddie Flintstone and Salvador Dali ? It’s charming and efficient. Wouldn’t stay anywhere else. 

Have I mentioned how Portland was named? In the 1830s It was named after Portland, Maine.

One of the founding fathers wanted to name it Boston. He and the man from Portland, Maine flipped a coin. You know who won. The coin is in the Oregon Historical Society.

Photos of Portland, Or. Lovely memories:

Graphic Lessons: What do a thirty-four-year old, a nine-year-old and an eighteen-year-old have in common? Murder. 

Millie Fitzgerald applies for a private school teaching job, faints on a  dying man in the school kitchen, deals with a troubled nine-year-old and with the eighteen-year-old niece of the murdered man.

Graphic Lessons: Nine-year-old Dana is the only witness who overhears a person fighting with George Lopez, the soon to be stabbed Windsor School kitchen worker. Who can she tell? Her mother who never listens or accuses her of lying? Her father who’s started a new family in Singapore? She tells Millie. 

Graphic Lessons: NYPD Detective Steve Kulchek is assigned the murder case at the prestigious Windsor School. What’s bugging him? His partner being stabbed ? His hated boss, Captain Dick Holbrook, being a trustee of the Windsor School?  Losing his girlfriend to Holbrook?