Mt. Tabor

    Mt. Tabor is a park in the center of Portland's East side. It's not much of a mountain, it's more of a hill. It's covered with big trees. There is a road that winds around and gets pretty near the top. Yesterday evening daring daughter and I found ourselves on the East side with some time to kill so we took a little drive and ended up driving up Mt. Tabor, which reminded me of a couple of incidents that happened twenty years ago with my parents.
    My wife and I were living in Beaverton at the time and my folks had come to visit. There was a big flowering plum tree growing in the tree lawn out by the curb. It was a beautiful tree in the spring when it blossomed, but then being a real plum tree and not an ornamental, it produced plums. By the time my parents arrived the ground was littered with ripe plums that had fallen off the tree. Yes, yes, we should have picked them and bottled them or something, but we were both working and we had little kids running around underfoot, so the plum tree was ignored and the plums fell unwanted on the ground.
    This wasn't normally a problem because there was a street light there so even if you were outside at night, the plums were easy to avoid because you could see them.
     My parents arrived after dark and when I opened the door I noticed it was pitch black outside. Our faithful street light had chosen this evening to quit. Unable to detect the purple landmines lying in their path, my folks had walked right over them and into my house and tracked smushed plums all over the living room carpet.
    A day or so later, my folks decided to go do a little exploring and ended up on Mt. Tabor where they parked their car and went for a walk. When they returned to the car, they found that someone had broken one of the windows of the car and taken my mom's purse.
    Until yesterday I had never been to Mt. Tabor. I mean it's on the East side. I seldom go over there. And what was it with my parents? I have never seen such a pile of bad luck as greeted them when they came to visit. It was like an unholy alignment of the planets or something. Just really weird.