“Bend” is the favorite four-letter epithet uttered by people who fear Baker City might soon succumb to the creeping suburbanism that has inflicted its architectural and commercial banality on so much of this country.

But I spent the night in Redmond earlier this summer, and it occurred to me that that city, rather than the budding metropolis that is Bend, perhaps offers the more compelling comparison.

There is, it seems to me, a widespread fallacy that not so long ago Bend and Baker City were akin to twins.

In fact, Baker hasn’t bested Bend since the 1920 Census.

That year, Baker’s population was 7,729, Bend’s 5,415.

A decade later Bend had gone ahead — 8,848 to 7,858 — and the Central Oregon city has widened its lead every decade since.

Redmond, though, is the classic late-bloomer.

As recently as 1970 (I realize this hardly qualifies as recent, but it happens to be the year I was born and so I’m inclined to downplay the significance of that span) Redmond was a mere stripling of 3,721 inhabitants.

That same year Baker boasted 9,354.

For a month now I’ve been tending a patch of new grass, and the stress of this endeavor, on which I embarked with great optimism, has begun to wear on me in a considerable way.

I ought to have known it would.

I figured out quite some years ago that my personality is ill-suited to the peculiar pressures of cultivation.

I lack the necessary patience, for one thing.

The process of horticultural germination, even at its speediest, seems to me painfully sluggish.

I just can’t go in for watching a patch of dirt, pining for the appearance of the first sprig of green.

I need instant gratification.

My current project is a path that runs between our backyard patio and the toolshed.

I built this path more than a decade ago. It’s maybe 30 feet long, with a comely curve along the way.

Initially the path’s surface was a mixture of pea gravel and decorative white stone. Last year I added a dozen or so round brick pavers, to keep a little girl from bruising her bare feet on the gravel.

But this summer Lisa decided grass, being vastly softer, was the better choice.

She spent many hours shoveling gravel and sifting out the dirt by means of a pair of metal screens. As is typical, she graciously failed to mention that I contributed not the least bit of effort to this task.

Until the first day of August, when I prised out the remaining pavers and smoothed the base of the path.

Then I put the pavers back, spaced out along the whole of the path, hauled in a dozen or so wheelbarrow loads of dirt and tamped it around the pavers to level the surface with the rest of the lawn.

The bladder is the prankster of organs.

This stretchy sack of tissue will plod along for months, performing its simple but vital duties with unremarkable consistency.

But under more pressing circumstances the bladder can turn as sneaky as a petulant three-year-old who’s just been told she can’t have dessert.

Let’s say, by way of example, that you’re backpacking in the Eagle Cap Wilderness, and an ill-tempered August snowstorm comes up, and you’re ensconced in a clammy tent trying to stave off hypothermia until dawn, when you can actually see the trail that leads to parking lot, where there should be a pickup truck with a heater.

That’s precisely the situation in which your bladder will get up to its mischief.

My bladder will, anyway.

Except when I happen to have a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

This temporarily clarifies the situation.

A handful of blackberries, dusted with a skim of sugar and gently bruised with the back of a spoon to release their pungent juice, can transform a scoop of soft serve into a dessert that’s positively ambrosial.

My predicament, though, has nothing to do with the various culinary uses of the blackberry. These, ranging from cobblers to jams to munching them fresh-plucked, are pretty much above reproach.

What I can’t figure out is whether, speaking ecologically rather than gastronomically, I’m for the fruit or against it.

The thing is, the Himalayan (also known as the Armenian) blackberry, according to biologists, is a noxious weed.

And we’re supposed to abhor those.

It’s been a strange summer in Baker County, weather-wise, but in my estimation a particularly pleasant one.

The season, should its current patterns persist clear through until autumn, now scarcely a month away, will rank as an especially moderate example of its kind.

This pleases me because our summers, when they diverge any great distance from average, tend to be decidedly uncomfortable.

Abnormally hot summers, for instance, annoy me because they soil what seems to me the essential reward of this golden season. This of course is the ability to go outdoors wearing a minimum of clothing and not worry overmuch about whether you’ve memorized the proper remedies for heatstroke.

I’m troubled, albeit slightly, by a federal judge’s ruling last week declaring California’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional.

But the cause for my dismay is not that Judge Vaughn Walker sided with those people who believe gay marriage should be legal.

I happen to be one of those people.

I don’t care if two people of the same gender get married.

And it bothers me not a whit if the government deems this legal arrangement a marriage rather than a civil union or some other silly euphemism.

So far as I can tell, society would do well to encourage pairs of adults — any pair of adults — to make lifetime commitments to love one another and to raise their children in a nurturing environment.

The greater problem in this country, it seems to me, is not that too many people want to get married but that too many of us can’t stay married.

I was awakened on a recent morning, and long before dawn, by the bleating of a deer fawn, searching for its mother.

This is the sort of benign annoyance I happily endure for the privilege of sleeping so near to where deer walk.

And bleat.

Which is a slightly less happy circumstance, at least when the bleating deer happens to be bleating right outside my bedroom window at 4:20 a.m.

Nor did it improve my attitude that the fawn’s plaintive cries had frightened another youngster, this one a little girl who insisted on climbing into her parents’ bed.

I can confirm as a result that, on the spectrum of effective sleep-deprivation techniques, a whining deer falls far short of a three-year-old who kicks you in the shin every few seconds.

Or someplace more sensitive than the shin.

Although I suppose the fawn’s kick could cause real damage, what with the hard hooves.

The story apparently ended as I hoped it would, with a reunion of mother and offspring.

What an interesting year to run for a seat on the Baker City Council.

In the same sense, you’re perhaps thinking, that swimming across the anaconda- and piranha-infested Amazon would be interesting.

I’ll concede that serving as a councilor has of late been an experience that couldn’t reasonably be described as tranquil.

In the past 14 months the Council has:

• Fired one city manager (Steve Brocato — or, to avoid potential confusion with city managers named Steve whose last name starts with “B” — Steve-1); had its top choice for his successor (Tim Johnson) first accept then reject the Council’s offer; hired a third person (Steve Bogart, or Steve-2); who announced that he’ll resign Sept. 23.

• Endured a campaign to recall from office two of the four councilors who voted to fire Brocato (Dennis Dorrah and Beverly Calder).

I don’t hate plastic grocery bags.

I struggle in fact to muster even a respectable level of disdain for these ubiquitous totes.

Although this one time a sack, traveling alone and propelled by the desert wind, wedged into the rear derailleur of my mountain bike and mucked up one of the sprockets.

And since I was riding the bike at the time this intrusion was something of a nuisance.

But that paltry anecdote pretty well covers my personal antipathy for this category of container.

This makes me feel rather like an outcast.

The war is over.

And the machines have won.

This dismal outcome could hardly have been otherwise, what with the human race’s curious obsession with automation.

Curious or not, I can go along with this predilection for quite a distance.

I don’t much like the prospect of scrubbing my undershorts on a washboard, for instance.

Or anybody else’s.

And having tussled with a few grudging garage doors in my time — usually during a rainstorm — I appreciate the brilliance of the electric, chain-driven opener which hoists the door at the push of a button.

(I have averted this particular hassle for the past 15 years through the clever device of owning a home which has no garage. If I had a garage, though, it would be equipped with an opener.)