So we've been in the Portland area now for about three months and I thought I would corral some of the impressions I've made of the Rose city so far. Here goes:
1. True to all assumptions and stereotypes, people really do drink a ridiculous amount of coffee in the Northwest--enough to justify Starbucks on three out of four corners of an intersection and at least two other locally owned coffee shops within sight. And just in case one of these is not convenient for you, there are cafes inside the first automatic doors of nearly every book store, grocery store and Target-esque store (they call them Fred Myers here) you walk into. So you can get good coffee (not just the gas station drizzle you picture-even quick shops have real espresso machines) pretty much wherever you go.
2. Speaking of Fred Myers, a store that overwhelms and confuses me, I hate it. I feel small when I walk in laning on my cart, like someone should give me four and a half hours, a pocket directory of the store, a price scan gun, a thorough explanation of the reasons for placing the beer section of the groceries right up against the tableware, which is next to the storage solutions (large plastic bins) in order for me to even begin to successfully find the things on my list. I will drive the one exta mile to the lovely familiar organization of Target. Ah the joyous convenience of the suburbs!
3. No matter where you are, local news is local news. Even in progressive, vibrant Portland, they will cover the wild deer adoption controversy, the most recent storm and the mayor's comments on the weather with equal hyperbolic enthusiasm.
4, It really does rain pretty much all the time here. I mean I knew it was rainy here and had heard all the statistics about depression and overcast weather in the Northwest but you really don't realize how true it is until mid October hits and you have completely forgotten what the sun feels like coming through a warm window and you have fully abandoned all attractive footwear for galoshes that it really does rain a lot, like pretty much all the time. It's not even noteworthy anymore. And I'm sure locals would be amazed it even took me this long to realize this quite obvious fact. I think I was holding out that we were having a rough year or something. Alas!
5. Highway 217 in Beaverton and Tigard was spawned from the same matter that really evil and annoying things were like smoke alarms with low batteries chirping in the middle of the night. Every time I have found reason to traverse 217, traffic immediately gridlocks, the heavens open in a fresh downpour and three BMW SUV's cut me off in the span of ten minutes. I may not have lived here long, but I have a deep seeded aversion to this highway. Ditto for the ramp traffic lights. V. Annoying.
6. If you have the money and the willingness to pop in and out of the rain , there is really miraculous shopping opportunities in the Portland area. We have indoor malls and outdoor malls (seems strange marketing campaign considering #4 above) quaint little neighborhoods with collections of boutiques and restaurants on all sides of the city and it seems to me like there are as many locally owned shops as chains. very refreshing coming from the midwest chain-land.
7. Despite the shopping loveliness, I thought there would be more thrift stores. I mean considering Portland's reputation for environmentally friendly, progressively hip attitudes, you'd figure there'd be a thrift store for every rainbow bumper sticker. But so far, I have not been impressed. Granted, Goodwill seems to be as prolific here as anywhere but the few true gems, the local thrift and second hand stores I have come across seem to be well aware of the value of their matching retro velvet lounge chairs, so fork over your $700 per chair thank you very much.
8. If bike and ski racks on land rovers and subarus are any indication, people really are more active here than in other parts of the country. Despite the rain, if I had a nickel for every spandex bicyclist who peddles up next to me in downtown traffic, my college loans would be paid off. And if Portland is any indication of how the rest of the country is going, we should be investing in Subaru.
9. Powell's really is pretty much the greatest place on earth. Assuming you don't have any outside obligations to pull you elsewhere, you could easily spend the better part of a month wandering the aisles of its colored rooms and periodically stopping off at the coffee shop on the ground floor. Its only downfall might be in this ability to overwhelm--it would be the perfect place to go if you had a ridiculously long layover in Portland and didn't know anyone.
10. Having hills surrounding a city make it really beautiful and somehow more mysterious. Most midwest cities lack this topographical benefit and I think really suffer the loss of aesthetic appeal. Portland feels at once like a bustling stop on major waterway and then also like a lovely little village you discovered through a magic tunnel or stumbled across atop a snowy mountain pass. The frequent morning fog makes the gradations in elevation even more beautiful and enchanting, as if you could weave your way up a hidden drive and find a magnificent castle or a magical cottage. The smaller hills and the larger mountain peaks in and around Portland make the city feel more like a discovery and like it belongs there. You don't get to see the skyline cropping out of the landscape from 100 miles down the freeway, it seems like you find it, or it lets you find it.
I am a winter hued girl. You may not know this about me. The combination of my light blonde hair, blue eyes and pink toned skin makes me look best in cool colors like ice pink and all blue tones and white, but not so good in colors like yellow, cream, bubblegum pink and other warm toned colors. I’ve known this for some time and I’m sure to some extent, it was some marketing campaign that taught me this to get me to throw out half of my wardrobe and buy new cool colored clothes. But I think it holds true. Often the shade of a pink shirt, as much as the style or the fabric, will either complement my skin tone and the blue of my eyes or clash with my natural tones. By genealogical odds, Finn is similarly colored and by some odd departure from his Mexican roots, James also has cool toned skin and eyes. We are a pale, blue eyed family.
This weekend, we painted the one room in our house, our bedroom that had not yet been painted at least once since we moved into our house 2 years ago. I painted it a darker blue-ish, grey-ish teal inspired by a t-shirt that my sister Meg gave James in a similar color. I really like it. I mean, this does not often happen. I usually buy paint by impulse and decide on a color that vaguely matches some color in my head that I saw in a magazine once and often looks not at all like how I imagined it would look. This is not always a bad thing. Our living room and Finn’s room ended up looking really great even though they came out far from the rooms of my imagining. Our kitchen, on the other hand is on its third paint color and I still hate it. This could have something to do with the fact that I generally hate our kitchen, the linoleum, the tendency towards grime and the mismatched cabinets. But all this is to say that I painted a blue room because it was a color I really loved on James and then as I looked around our house last night and saw the aqua of the front room, the various greens of the kitchen, Finn’s room and the library and the mud color of the entry and the dining room, (more of a grayish brown than a chocolate) I realized that our entire house is cool colored, painted in tones that would look good on us in a shirt. Maybe this is some subconscious desire to frame us all in a complementary light or maybe I have so trained myself to be drawn to cool colors in clothing, that I am now drawn to the same colors in paint. But either way, I have a very aqua and green house. I’m sure that in not so many years, these colors will be the mustard yellow and pea green of my parents generation, disgusting, overdone and out of style. I will have to move on to a new cool color; I am a winter after all. But I will be sad to see Aqua go.
I feel guilt come over me when I realize that I have been looking at a non-work related e-mail for ten minutes now and probably missed things that I should have been doing to do my job. And then I flip over to my work e-mail and there are no new messages and I flip over to my calendar and our database and there is still nothing new to do. And so I bring up my gmail again and read another paragraph of a beautiful essay written by a friend who is trying to get a job where she can help people discern their spiritual and occupational direction. I wish that I was doing something so connected and important. But then I feel guilty again and try to find something work related to do and I sigh for what I am wasting and what I am wanting and for all the things that eight hours a day could accomplish.
Yesterday, Finn passed a big milestone, the first Birthday. Unless he has uncanny memory skills, he will not remember a thing about it. He won’t remember me lifting him out of his crib in the morning and doing a jig around his room singing “happy, happy happy birthday to you to you to you-oo-oo” like the way the waiters sing at Mexican restaurants. And he will probably not remember James driving him up to Panera bread, as they do every Thursday to hand him over to my mom for the day and where this day in particular she will tell everyone she sees that her grandson is one today and allow them the joy of celebrating with her by giving Finny something for free--a cookie as big as his head, an ice cream. He will not remember how his new habit of pointing to everything but especially things in the air or on the ceiling will obligingly seem like he is showing how old he is now, how many years he has been here-how cute we will think that is. And he will certainly not remember how my dad, his grandpa held him on his lap at the Cheesecake Factory last night and laughed till his face turned red and he had to cough for the effort of it while Finny slapped at the lit candle and then the whip cream and then the mound of ice cream in the sundae that the kind waitress had brought him as yet another free treat to celebrate; how he smooshed the sundae in the direction of his mouth and then repeatedly turned towards dad to see what was so funny and reach up with whip creamed hands to touch his mustache and his nose. I’m sure he will not remember how in the car on the way home, while he shrieked in his car seat approaching a full blown break down, James and I discussed how to best handle small children in restaurants. And at the end of the day yesterday, I stripped Finn down to his onesie, changed his diaper, cranked the dial on the stone angel that played music and swung him into his crib on his belly. He watched me put things away in his room and then let his head fall down on his sheet where he couldn’t see me below the bumper and he was asleep shortly after. He won’t remember it but I will, the whole day. And I guess that’s the point. We make a big deal every year on at least this one day. And though eventually he will start to understand and demand presents and parties, yesterday was really more about us, about making my mom proud and my dad laugh, making James and me grateful and remembering how one year ago last night, Finny came out of me into the world and changed everything.
On the west coast, the realization that came with the terrorist attacks on September 11th, that our lives were changed, that our world was at risk, that “the American way of life was being threatened” came in a very different tone than it did for other coasts, for other places. I was a sophomore in college, avoiding an early morning aerobics class, laying in bed groggily, when a thin, large eyed friend who lived in the room across the hall burst in our room and said her mom just called from Massachusetts, planes were crashing all over the country and hundreds of people were dying. It was a dream. I’m sure that has been said before, in those exact terms, a dream. But as I pulled on a pair of maroon sweat pants with felt numbers on the left hip, as if I was athletic and shouldered a grey hooded sweatshirt over my head, aware that the colors complemented and that I looked attractively rumpled, aware at that point that it mattered what I looked like when flip flopping into the dorm lounge to watch the TV bolted to the upper corner of the wall, I was dreaming. I was not awake yet. I shuffled into the lounge and watched the news cast, the pictures at 7am in the morning as others had already been at work for hours and then been scorched to death or thrown themselves out of burning windows 57 stories off the ground. It was a dream. I was groggy still and then I woke up gradually to the choked up accounts of journalists, the ashen faces of onlookers, the shrieking drone of sirens. I remember being amazed that everything continued to work, that the shower still turned on and the cafeteria ladies still came to work and the microwave hummed with my hot chocolate water. I was amazed that everything didn’t just take a few days off to be very sad. We spent the day in the dorm room lounge on the pristine Montecito campus of a small private college where the lack of parking passes was the biggest problem we faced, in a town full of movie stars in flip flops in a state where Arnold just won in a country full of those that remembered another time of crisis and a generation that had never had crisis before. I peered at this trauma through a small television screen, shoulder to shoulder with the educationally and financially elite, the millennial generation who had not seen civil rights or Vietnam, or the atom bomb but through an even more distant film strip in history classes or in the distant voices of our grandparents. This was very new to us.
A year later, I was studying abroad in England with lovely intelligent people from that same pristine college and our two professors and their spouses led us through the cities of the UK and settled us in to a month long stint of intensive study at an enormous old manor house run by nuns called Hengrave Hall. The nearest town was called Bury St. Edmonds and to reach it, one must amble down a picturesque lane through the grand entrance gate of Hengrave, along a street lined with thatched houses and cottage gardens to a very regular and modern looking bus shelter where you caught a very regular and modern looking bus and wound through the roads that were made before maps, before cars and before modern looking anything to the city center bus stop. It was on a day that I had come into town to escape the literary intensity of my comrades to walk through the local market, that I stopped for a coffee and a sandwich in a very british looking café. I sat at a small table near the window, aware as I always was when away from my group, of my American voice ordering the meal and my very American hair and shoes. I had brought a book of poetry, partly to feel productive while escaping and partly because I knew that I would stop and eat alone and eating alone with a book in hand is far less pathetic. As the waiter brought my plate and I pushed my cup of coffee further towards the center of the table to make room, I was aware of sympathetic looks. I thought back to the bus ride and the walk through the market and realized that I had received many of these looks throughout the day, from the chemist at the drug store when I asked where to find a certain kind of chapstick, from the vendor at the market who had sold me a scarf I planned to give my sister for Christmas. They heard my voice and cringed a little and smiled. I sat eating my sandwich carefully, thinking how strange those looks had been. And then the manager of the little café came out from the kitchen and said in a slightly raised voice as he looked around the room, “In respect for the lives lost and the terrible tragedy that took place in America exactly one year ago, I would ask your silence for a minute now to remember.” The café hushed and many people looked towards my table near the window. A woman near the swinging door to the kitchen bowed her head and some businessmen looked towards the large clock above the bar, their faces furrowed and concerned. The sympathy in the room was palpable. I felt a thick knot rise in my throat and nearly sobbed for the sadness of it all. I knew that I was being watched and so did not sob, or even cry a little; I knew, especially as a lover of literature that that would have been too much, too dramatic. But I loved England so much in that moment. The thoroughness of the emotion was full in me in Bury St. Edmonds, a small British town outside of London.
I just thought of a smell that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. Winter sweat. I was thinking about how I wanted to start exercising and that I would ride my bike to work, all one mile of it and how I would maybe smell or be sweaty when I got to work and how my dad used to run miles and miles every day on his lunch break and then shower and be back to his day, refreshed, exercised, like a horse. When he ran during the winter, he wore wind pants and a long sleeved t-shirt, some shwag from the last marathon he had run, a knit hat of nuetral color (but not cool nuetral like khaki or chocolate, usually just grey or navy) and those small one-size fits all gloves that stretch over your fingers and reach just to the veins of your inner wrist. Running was the only time I saw my dad where a hat. He was and is a very functional man with a thick head of wavy hair that in the seventies grew long and very Michael Landon-ish but in my child hood was cut short, not buzed but short so that he had a perfect rippling helmet when he brushed his hair back after taking a shower. Baseball hats or flat top old man hats or winter caps for their fashionable or bald spot covering function had no practical purpose for him so the only time he wore a hat was to cover his ears while running in the winter. Saying that he ran in the winter implies a certain commitment to his craft, we lived for nine years in upstate new york where every winter we had snow drifts so tall that we dug forts out of the side of them, not rolled up into a pile, dug out of from the sidewalk or the road with intricate rooms. Granted, I was small at the time, but these were large snow banks. Large like you couldn’t see our Winnebago parked in the drive way from the side, snow banks. One winter, we had such a big storm that all the electricity went out and our heat must have been electric because we all had to sleep in the living room in sleeping bags around the fireplace and when we woke up and the TV flashed on, the news was saying that the Challenger had exploded and we were all very sad and cold and snowed in.
We also lived in Minnesota where temperatures are judged by the actual and feels like, both usually in double digit negative numbers. My freshman year of high school, the governor (Jesse Ventura the ex-wrestler mind you, no sissy politician from the city) called off all schools in the state because wind chills were going to reach -65 degrees. My dad ran in the winter in Minnesota too. In fact he trained for the grandma’s marathon in Duluth, the last marathon he would run through the winter, running the mile and a half to the community center and then running about 897 laps on the indoor track and then running the mile and a half home to cool off.
And when he came home, I remember this from the very first memories I have, he smelled like winter sweat, a different, more pungeant version of sweat that hung in the air around him like the cold air itself, thawing in the indoors and becoming more potent. He grew a beard every winter and the condensation of his breath would freeze into icicles on his beard making him seem like he had come in from another world, very supernatural and Narnia like.
I wonder often why this running thing, I guess you would call it a passion or a talent, didn’t run in the family, no pun intended. I have never had the inclination for nor the ability to run. I realize that running long distance takes conditioning and training. But it just would not take. I tried. When we first moved to Minnesota the summer before my freshman year of high school and I started to go by Kate instead of Katie and went on the first diet of my life (something having to do with grapefruit and bacon) to have a fresh start and be the funniest, most stunning person anyone had ever met, I started to run. I ran on the beautiful trails surrounding our apartment complex, past a lake and a few churches, through lovely peaceful woods and serene backyards…and my lungs nearly seared themselves through my chest when I finally stopped and panted and clutched my right arm as if anticipating a heart attack. I had run a half a mile. I started again the next day and would try all manner of distractions from singing favorite songs (obviously in silence, I couldn’t pant frantically and sing at the same time) to replaying particualrly vexing moments in my recent life and figuring out the best, most witty and cutting thing to say to achieve my goals. Nothing worked and I gave up quickly. I started high school with an awkward hair cut that was ment to look like Meg Ryan in IQ and the same extra pudge that had hung with me since childhood. Running was not my game.
I think perhaps that my dad has always run as a process of renewing, of coming back to something paced and kinetic. He had run track as a kid, in fact it was coming home from a track meet that he had walked into his kitchen and heard that his father had had a massive heart attack and was dead. My dad had been running when his dad dropped dead. There must be something to that. He had placed in two events that day. Maybe he returns to running every time to get back to before the sky came down, before his mom taught sewing classes in their basement to keep food on the table and they saw less of his dad’s raucous family and had a lot less fun. Maybe running has always been something that he has been good at. He won two ribbons that day and no matter what happened later in life, he could beat his mile pace; he could find a new trail and clock it with the car and run it in a loop. I ran to accomplish, to be thinner or be able to eat more. I think my dad thought these things too. I mean his dad died of a heart attack at 43, a short life of whole milk and not enough exercise. So he ran to be healthy but he also ran to pound out stress or process through things. He was happier when he ran regularly.
I thought all of this in some form tonight while I was rinsing the shampoo out of my hair, how maybe I should write it down, the memory of winter sweat and how the writing it will make it more permanent, a history instead of a flashing rememberance that I will not remember tomorrow but that will leave a bit of a pang because I knew it was a good thing that I had remembered. So I write it down, for what it will accomplish but also for the process of remembering and I am happier for articulating it, for pounding it out on the keys. Writing it makes me put the thought into a sequence and make sense of it. And I know that my writing, whether I make anything of it or not, is like my dad’s running. We return to something we know to put reason back and find the peace in the pavement or the clarity of the document.