212areacode said:
Okay, the column Canzano did on the Taylor family HAD TO BE among his APSE entries I'm guessing. Can anyone locate it online?
Family of Blazers fans has lesson about rebuilding
By John Canzano
The e-mail was waiting, jammed in my in box one morning along with a few hundred others responding to a column I'd written on the Trail Blazers.
This was more than a year ago. I don't remember exactly what the note said, but it was signed "jt" at the bottom and he was a die-hard Blazers fan. I responded by cutting and pasting a dismissive, formulaic response: "Thanks for the note. Write any time."
Then, I hit "Send" and moved on to the next e-mail.
A year later, I was in the car, driving across the Ross Island Bridge, into the heart of Southeast Portland, toward the rental house where JT's family lives.
And I felt numb.
I drove past dozens of city blocks, and some boarded up storefronts, until the road turned from pavement to gravel. Then it turned from gravel to dirt. And when I came upon the address he'd given me on the telephone, I found a smiling 5-year-old boy standing in the front yard wearing Spiderman underwear on his head like a hat.
His name was Payton. And when he saw me climb out of my car, he shouted toward the house, "Canzano's here!" and two other children came running out, smiling and waving.
Then, JT, embarrassed, slid out the front door, swiped the underwear off his son's head and said, "Those had better be clean."
Maybe you're like a lot of Blazers fans, fretting over the news of what the Sonics sale means to Portland. Or maybe you're concerned the Blazers are going to finish with the worst record in the league again next season. But if we're really talking about the worries of Blazers fans, there is a three-bedroom house in Southeast Portland that might be a good place for us to begin and end the discussion.
After that initial e-mail, in 2005, JT wrote me again the next day. And again the next. And I've come to expect that every time I write a column about the Blazers, there will be an e-mail from JT waiting for me.
I've also come to understand that there is always more to the story.
Until this week, I didn't know his real name. I didn't know where he worked. I didn't know if he had children. Or if he was 20 years old or 90. I never asked. He never told. But I knew that he loved the Blazers, and that he had good punctuation, and I noticed the only capital letter he used was "I," for some reason. And after what I've learned this week, I feel ashamed that I waited so long to ask questions.
His real name is Jason Taylor. He's 29. He has three perfect children --a boy and two girls, ages 5 to 11. Six months ago, he was laid off from his job manufacturing airplane parts. After that, he was forced to sell his house to avoid a foreclosure.
Sad stuff, you're thinking.
Except JT never mentioned any of this until last week, when he was apologizing for not checking in more regularly with a Blazers note, because he was busy taking care of the kids and had taken a part-time job delivering this newspaper in "Felony Flats."
