Zero Cancer Run/Walk – June 11, 2017

Sunday, June 11th, 9:00 a.m. Zero Prostate Cancer walk.  The Retiree Network will not be fielding a team this year, but we do encourage individual retirees to support and/or participate in this 1k riverfront walk from Elizabeth Caruthers Park to Downtown Portland.  Elizabeth Caruthers Park (3508 SW Moody Ave, in the South Waterfront District).  For more information contact Gary Lesniak at garylesniak@yahoo.com

Pinot & Prose Book Club Selections for June-August 2017

Some of our avid readers have asked for advance information on our next reading selections.

The book group has chosen for our June selection:  “A Man Called Ove” by Fredrik Backman and for August (we take our ‘summer break’ in July), we’ll be reading: “Astoria, John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire – A Story of Wealth, Ambition and Survival” by Peter Stark.

The discussion session for June will be held at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, June 28th and the discussion session for August will be held at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, August 23rd both sessions will be held at Walter Mitty’s Restaurant.

 

Association of Northwest Landscape Designers’ 13th Annual Garden Tour

Saturday, June 17th, Association of Northwest Landscape Designers’ (ANLD) 13th Annual Garden Tour.

Proceeds from this annual event benefit the ANLD scholarship program for aspiring landscape designers attending Clackamas CC and Portland CC. Tickets may be purchase at the ANLD web site or many Portland area nurseries for $25. For a listing of ticket locations or to purchase on line check out the ANLD web page. Since these are gardens at private residences of ANLD clients, the specific locations of the gardens and a map are made available once you have purchased tickets.

PCC Retiree Network Calendar of Events, May 2017

Here are the events coming up in May 2017 (and a few future dates to save below):

Annual Foundation Retiree Luncheon, Friday, May 5^th, 11:30 a.m. social, 12:00 p.m. lunch.  At PCC Southeast Campus, Tabor Hall, Room 143 (2305 SE 82^nd Avenue, Portland).

May Happy Lunch, Wednesday, May 10^th, 1:00 p.m.:  The group decided to meet at ‘Gather’ (menu link), the restaurant within the Lloyd Center DoubleTree Hotel (location and parking link).  We’ll need RSVP’s by Monday, May 8th to make our reservation.  RSVP either by using the comment field below or by hitting reply to your emailed version of this message.

May Art & Conversation, Portland Art Museum, Thursday, May 18th, (coffee at 9:15 a.m., lecture at 10:15 a.m.:   The May 18^th presentation will be a discussion of the special exhibition titled “Constructing Identity”.  Mike Murawski, Director of Education and Public Programs will speak on highlighted works from the exhibition and will be joined by special guests to discuss the Art is Ours community gallery, a collaboration with the Museum of Impact that features creative response to the Constructing Identity exhibition by Portland-based artists of color.

Pinot & Prose Book Club, Wednesday, May 24th, 11:30 a.m.:  Our May selection is book 2 of “Suite Francaise” (Dolce’) by Irene Nemirovsky, we’ll hold the discussion at Walter Mitty’s Restaurant.

Retiree Network Business Meeting, Wednesday, May 24th, 1:00 p.m., at Walter Mitty’s Restaurant.

Future Events include:

NeighborWalks: Beginning in mid-May and continuing through the summer months, the Oregon Chapter of AARP will sponsor a series of walks through Portland neighborhoods. For more information and schedules:  NeighborWalks

Cascadia, Our Geology, Our Selves, Thursday, May 25^th, 7:00 p.m. Mercy Corps Center, 45 SW Ankeny Street, Portland.  A presentation on preparedness for “the Big One”, led by environmental scientist Robert Butler and Mercy Corps’ Director of U.S. Disaster Preparedness.  Tickets are $5 for seniors and students.  Purchase tickets by visiting mercycorps.org/action-center/events or call 503-896-5747.

39th Annual PCC Retirement Dinner:  Friday, June 2nd.  For more information: Retirement Dinner.

Zero Cancer project run/walk, Sunday, June 11^th, TBA a.m.  Gary is working with the Zero Cancer group and developing a concept of a “Dance Walk” for this South Water Front event.

June 25^th, The Pianist of Willesden Lane, a play based on the book The Children of Willesden Lane which we read in November 2016 will be returning to Portland Center Stage in June.  All our group tickets have been sold, but tickets are still available from Portland Center Stage.

38th Annual PCC Retirement Dinner

It’s just around the corner.  Friday, June 2, 2017, PCC Sylvania Cafeteria; No host bar & hors d’oeuvers at 4:30 p.m.  Dinner & Awards begin at 6:00 p.m.  To RSVP and pay on-line or if you just want to see who is a list of those retiring this year, click this link: Retirement Dinner or call 971-722-5859.

Do the sun teases having you wanting to get outside? Check out the Oregon AARP’s NeighborWalks program for Portland

It’s been a long winter but at last we’re getting some reminders that sun and warmer weather is on the way.  Want to get outside for some friendly neighborhood walks?  The Oregon Chapter of AARP has a full schedule of neighbor walks beginning Saturday, May 13th and continuing through the summer months.  For information about the specific Portland area walks, click this link:  NeighborWalks

 

Pinot & Prose Book Club selection for May, 2017

Suite Française by Irene Nemirovsky

Winner of France’s 2004 Prix Renaudot.

Wait, wasn’t that the April book selection?   Well, yes but we failed note in April that this book is actually a compilation of two short novels on related subject matter, set in the same WWII era of France, but each is a separate story with different characters telling stories of different aspects of the French experience during the war.   Our April reading was ‘book 1’ titled “A Storm In June”.  For May, we will be reading ‘book 2’ titled Dolce’.  (See highlighted note below.)

Publisher Comments

By the early 1940’s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française the first two parts of a planned five-part novel, she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France where she, her husband and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece

The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.

Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.

Enjoy the book and join your fellow retirees for a discussion on Wednesday, May 24th at 11:30 a.m. at Walter Mitty’s Restaurant.