This spring, I took a writing class offered through Write Around Portland. It was called “Prompt” because each week we would meet and write for a limited amount of time–usually somewhere between 2-8 minutes–to a number of different prompts. As the school year grinds to a start and I have less time to write, I will be featuring excerpts from my writing class in lieu of the weekly essay.
Some of you “out-clickers” have already read this, as it was the piece I picked for the broadsheet. The prompt was “along Burnside.”
The sidewalks are skinny. Too small to hold the accumulated panhandlers, tourists and residents who travel along Burnside. There are even posted signs, directing us to keep walking, not to stop and sit, or contemplate the heavy traffic. Sometimes, I think back a few decades, imagining the hybrids sprouting tailfins and doubling in length, then morphing again into Model Ts and early horseless carriages, and soon I hear the quiet clop of a horse pulling a carriage. As my mind travels back, buildings transform, replaced by their shorter predecessors. I go further back and traffic thins until the road itself disappears, replaced by a footpath leading through the trees to the banks of the Willamette River.
