This is one of the 100 questions prospective American citizens must learn the answers to.

Last night, I was telling my Citizenship class about our upcoming local election. Using it as an example,  I had a hard time convincing my students that voting is really all that important.  It will be much easier a year from now, even though a lot of our presidential campaign rhetoric is lost in translation.

Only one item on our ballot this time. A local issue.  I have received lots of expensive mailers about this.  Of course, in Oregon, all voting is by mail as well, and I will be receiving my ballot soon.

No “going to the polls” here, and we have virtually nonexistent voter fraud.

Here’s the deal:

We need improved public transportation, and somebody has to pay for it. Ideally, the people who use it should pay for it, but this is not an ideal world. The choice on the ballot asks, “Who should pay for it?” Employers (which could be the hospital or the doughnut shop owner)? That would be a “yes” vote. Or should property owners pay? That would be a “no” vote.

As a home owner, I can see on my property tax bill that I make generous contributions to local public education and to public transportation— which neither I nor anyone in my family has every used. Nevertheless, I am happy to support both. Now, I have to decide whether I can afford to support public transportation at a higher level or whether I should look to the owner of the doughnut shop to do so.

Frigiliana.

I could go back to Spain, again and again.

Once again, as Mark Twain wrote:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Every once and a while, Jack comes to 1880 to visit Roxie and me.  (Rosie, is not so much into visiting dogs and hides out upstairs.)  Jack brings his own bed, which Roxie immediately appropriates for her own use.

That means poor Jack has to find someplace else for his nap.

Oregon is a small state and a big state.  It has a small population but a relatively large area.

In less time that it takes to drive from Salem to Roseburg, you could drive across New Jersey.  The governor lives in my neighborhood  and left from here to make that drive on Wednesday.

Oregon is very diverse, made up of some very reactionary groups, some very liberal groups, and lots of people like me, not in any groups at all.  Everyone is very sad this week — lumberjacks, hunters, pot-smokers, church ladies, teachers, rednecks, doctors, lawyers, tinkers, tailors, cowboys, chiefs.

This is the way I like to think of Oregon:

Tragically, this is the way the rest of the world is seeing us right now:

This is all many of us previously knew about Roseburg –just a couple of shots from the Interstate:

This week, we all “got off the Interstate.”

I am having a bad case of wanderlust this weekend.  Since I can’t actually get away, I am binging on “foreign films.”   Not foreign films in the usual sense of the phrase.  Actually, the first one on my list is Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris,  to be followed by Tea with Mussolini, Room with a View, Gigi, and Roman Holiday. If time holds out, I’ll add Death on the Nile.

Mark Twain got it right:  Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.