Fare Well, FoHo: The Old ‘Hood, Naked Barbies & Feeling Exiled.

Almost immediately after reaching cruising altitude on my flight to Portland last month, when that slow upward movement started to level out, I began to feel an intensely physical pull from my chest.  It felt as though a cable were looped through my sternum – a thick, heavy-duty braided steel cable – and it was pulling me, and the plane, forward.  And down.  The most delicate, almost imperceptible sloping down toward the ground.  It wasn’t frightening.  It was disorienting. I could almost feel the hand on the lever using real strength to crank the cable in, bit by bit by bit. It felt like someone was tugging me toward the meeting of the Willamette and the Columbia – that picturesque point of Kelly Point Park where you can see both rivers merging and pushing out toward the ocean. Like my body telling me I was going home.  Like Portland pulling me closer, whispering here, here, here I am, waiting. 

The sensation was so physical that I pulled out a section of newspaper and began writing down how it felt – scribbling around the margins of the fluff stories and comics and word puzzles.  I could feel the cranking, the slow-motion jerk stop-and-start of that kind of cabling system.  I felt a little dizzy, off center.  My plane was definitely going forward – it was certainly level – and yet.  Yet it felt like I was sloping so slowly forward and down, forward and down, magnetized toward Portland. Like we might stage an adventurous and fabulous water landing just past the Fremont Bridge, slowing quickly enough to stop well before hitting the St John’s Bridge.  A grand entrance.  Home.  Finally.

The time gone – seven months since my one and only visit after moving – became just a moment in my life.  I almost felt like I was flying home to Portland.  It was my first time flying since moving back to California, so it felt like all of those return trips from California I had made in the last year of living in Portland.  Which conjured a whole other set of sense-memories that further derailed my equilibrium, a blender full of emotions and broken relationships and wayward feelings. I kept pulling that twice-folded piece of newspaper out of the seat-pocket and scribbling all over it, searching for clear grey space, wanting desperately to remember how this flight felt physically – the way it tricked my mind and my body and my heart.  The way this jumbling of home and memory and heartache played itself out in my muscles and bones and on my skin.

I was excited to visit.  Of course I was.  I missed my friends and my places.  I also hadn’t had a relatively stress-free time in Portland in a long time.  My last year there was wrought with tension and stress and emotional overload.  Even my first visit to Portland after moving was so intense that it has left an after-taste in my mouth somewhat akin to drinking cheap whiskey straight from the bottle – unforgettable and head-turning and grimace inducing.

Nothing was easy on that first trip.  I was deep in the relationship that would unravel a couple of months later – I was at a point where nothing wrong enough had happened but I should have seen the signs in the kinds of long, tedious conversations we acted out on that trip.  In hindsight, I can see the atom-bomb that trip laid in my relationship with Oregon and with Portland and with that ex.  I needed this trip to replace that.  I needed my Portland, not our Portland.  I was looking forward to a true visit – relaxing and funny and stomach-stuffing and full of the weightlessness of good times with good friends.

I also wanted to say a final goodbye to my old neighborhood.  I had tried to do that on the first visit – in fact some of these pictures are from that trip.  It was cold and we walked around taking pictures, my friend and my ex and I, but I didn’t hang out in the places I knew so well.  I didn’t walk in those doors and smell those smells and kiss those places, so quietly and so lovingly, goodbye. I still believed, then, that I would be back at least every month.  I thought I didn’t have to truly let go yet.  I thought I could hold onto the neighborhood I had spent nearly a decade in – the longest of my life so far – so long that it had begun to feel like an extension of my own shoulders, like another set of arms spreading out around me and providing any weird little thing I might need.

What feels like a million years ago (and also only yesterday), when my ex-girlfriend and I bought our house in Portland, it was further away from the center of town than we had hoped.  Our realtor said it was considered the new ‘close-in’ – that coveted real estate term that meant high value and great neighborhood amenities. We gave each other that invisible-wink look – yeah, sure it is, ok.  Whether we believed her or not wasn’t important. We couldn’t afford the neighborhoods we really wanted, so we were opening up to neighborhoods we didn’t know, exploring unfamiliar territory since we were only nine months into our life in Oregon.

When we saw our house, we fell in love pretty quickly.  We had to – it was a hot market and we made an offer about 24 hours after looking at it.  It was barely on the west side of Foster and the east side of Foster used to be called Felony Flats.  It was already in the process of revitalizing (you know, old people dying and young families buying in) when we moved, but the grimiest parts of it were actually endearing to me.  I grew up in Fresno, California and while I lived in ‘nice neighborhoods’ from junior high on, they were still in a part of town that meant we heard gunfire and sirens frequently.  My high school rang out with the sounds of multiple languages and drive-by shootings (the latter, rarely, thank the goodlords, but . . .).

I have always found the sanitized dream of real suburbia discomfiting and so my little ‘hood, right where Holgate and Foster meet, felt instantly like a cozy robe.  I read an article soon after moving about how it was an up and up and coming neighborhood.  They nicknamed it FoHo to try to give it an identity and nudge the process along.  I didn’t ever really think it would take on the prestige of certain other Southeast neighborhoods in town (and neither did anyone else, I’m sure), but I crossed my fingers for more restaurants, cafes, bike shops, non-slick but non-felonious bars.

Throughout the nine years I lived in that house, our small stretches of Foster and Holgate saw the opening and closing of a lot of businesses – including a casket shop, the Atheist Association headquarters and a moped shop.  There was also, though, the long-standing plumbing supply with its large neon water-heater-man logo and the Decorette Shop, full of frosting and cake molds and other domestic treasures, and the Tan and Hide shop that traded gloves for hides and whose antler lamps always called to me through the large picture windows, as well as the Pal-Do market with its dried octopus and seafood delicacies.

We gathered more restaurants – some short-lived – and bars and knick-knack shops.  When Snowpocalypse hit, we could walk (a long walk, to be sure) to the Fred Meyer or we could trek to the Round Table for pizza and salad.  In normal weather, I could walk for breakfast or coffee or beer at a number of local places.  Whenever a store went vacant, we would throw out our wishes – good Thai food, great ice cream, a fruit stand – and wait with baited breath until we saw what went in: a call-center, a poker place, a head shop, another biker bar.  All of it, though, was our ‘hood – sweetly grimy and podunk and traffic-ridden.  Nothing was left of the original cross-town horse and buggy thoroughfare except occasionally the smell of shit.  But it was ours – and it was mine, for a very long time by the standards of my life.  I missed FoHo as much as anything else in Portland, really, if not more.

I planned a whole evening – an open house of sorts – around that intersection of mine at Holgate and Foster.  I invited all of the people I missed and loved to come see me there – in case one on one visits didn’t happen – and then I showed up slightly late to my own party, dropped off in the rain by a friend who would join us later. I walked in to smiles and hugs and hilarious women, to more men and women walking through the door and up to the bar, to more hugs and more laughs and more smiles.  We started at Bar Carlo where I had ordered many a breakfast, where I had leashed my dogs to the water meter outside and ordered many an Americano,  where I had my last Portland meal with some of my best friends on my last night in town.  I had coffee and breakfast for dinner and then ordered a vodka and soda with lime and settled in to see what the night had in store.

We took up half of the side room and more people came in as I handed off a bag of naked barbies I had been holding for months – supplies for a friend who wanted to make a holiday wreath out of them.  One example of the kind of odd cargo I often travel with, having found them at a salvage place in Oakland at the beginning of the year and then moved them several times before putting them in my carry on for this flight to Portland.  And while everyone was already laughing, already joking, catching up with each other, being snarky and sarcastic and heartfelt and basically the amazing people I missed so much – an odd thing happened.

The friend who now had possession of her barbies started to pull them out and perch them on the edge of the table, looking at and inventorying her long-awaited toys. Once one naked barbie was out of the bag, though, all we could do was pose them and photograph them.  In compromising positions.  In miraculous poses.  Hanging from lights.  Bent over glasses.  Bent over each other.  We nicknamed several of these rag-tag plastic beauties.  Inappropriate and perfect names. One friend discovered her knack for shooting just the right barbie porn shot while a male friend (and his wife) realized he was the Barbie Whisperer – able to pose barbies for just the right shot, intuitively, skillfully, artfully.  We laughed and laughed and laughed.  We discovered that Anal Bead Barbie’s string got shorter if you pulled her hair.  We noticed that one barbie was the plastic equivalent to double-jointed. We were all more than a little frightened of Vapid Expression Barbie.

The waiter came through several times before one of my friends said something about what we were doing, about it being strange.  And he said, so matter-of-factly, completely nonplussed, “You’re having a barbie party”.  The silent ‘duh’ was written all over his face. To which we railed off into laughter, again, over and over through the night, replaying his Portland immunity to such weirdness. Of course.  Why would we have thought he might be worried about us?  Think we were strange?  This was Portland.  And Southeast Portland, to boot.

We had so much fun that when the woman who I delivered these barbies to decided she had to leave and we were migrating to our next FoHo stop, she left us with the dolls.  I hesitated, worried about nabbing them away from her so soon after her long-awaited meeting with them and she shoved the bag at me – the obviousness of how much fun was left to be had clear in the gesture. So the handoff was undone and would have to happen again because, apparently, we all love naked barbies.  I was with my people.  For sure.

I carried the reusable grocery bag full of naked dolls over to the newest bar on Foster, a borderline-cheesy Zodiac-themed place owned by Portland Indie-Retail Royalty, and it wasn’t long before the barbies were out on the table, the newest additions to our party just getting into the fun, discovering how fun barbie-in-the-bar photo shoots can be, test shots being taken in this new, darker lighting, against these reflective table-tops.

Then, in the most Portland moment of the night: strangers asked, inquired and then started their own barbie shoots (once I delivered dolls to their tables, their hesitant, shy faces turned grateful and smiling).  For hours, half the bar was engaged in barbie play.  One table staged an elaborate Esther Williams scene – my favorite, really, of the whole night – and another group made napkin clothes and figured out that Turquoise Girdle Barbie actually spun around and so has been named Suck N’ Spin Barbie. The foosball table was filled with posing barbies and others were propped against the oft-ordered bad beers of the northwest.

I was full of vodka and chocolate caramel Torte and love and nostalgia and as I looked around the bar, I knew (deep in my marrow) that this wasn’t home anymore but I also knew exactly – in that wordless way of real love – what I adored and held deeply sacred about this city. I try to get at it with words even though I know I will fail – there’s the kindness and openness and un-self-consciousness of its people, there’s the way that weird is normal and expected, there’s the relaxed feel of even the coolest places and the cluster of creativity that hovers anywhere you go in town, the kind of energy in a place where people move or stay without any practical reason, but just because they love it, the kind of city people choose to live in.  There’s the best of small-town life everywhere – whether grimy or seedy or downright provincial.

And I can try to zero in on why FoHo is my place, became the epitome of what Portland is to me – the dirt and grime and fresh paint and old-school supply stores and the people who go places not because they are hip or clean or ironic, but because it’s where you live, it’s your neighborhood and there’s a fierceness to the loyalty of that, the way that Portlanders love their independent businesses, their real bars, their quirky spaces and wobbly tables.

But ultimately there are not enough words – or the right words – to get at Portland or FoHo and what they are for me, who Portland is for me, how it feels from the inside of me.  There’s a large static-filled space in my body where Portland resonates.  Where no words are needed.  A place that Portland fills up and pushes out, out, out.  All of Portland.  I also went to my favorite Cuban restaurant and my favorite brunch spot and my favorite purveyor of local goods.  I went to new places.  I visited with old coworkers, long-time friends, met a baby whose birth I missed, devoured garden grits with my long-time ex-girlfriend and shared the kinds of updates and family news that only people who’ve known you that long can really appreciate, really understand.  I stayed with my closest Portland friend and her husband, tagged along with and dragged her everywhere.  I got a new tattoo from a friend whose skill and talent and humor I’ve already missed most fiercely twice now in California while under someone else’s needle. I wallowed in everything I love and miss about that grid of a city. I felt that static open up in me almost everywhere I went.

But I didn’t feel what I expected while doing any of this.  I had trouble even approaching – in my own mind – what it was I felt. And here is where it gets truly strange, so difficult to explain, so personal and unintentionally evasive.  Even though I was raised in California, lived most of my life here and have returned to it, indefinitely, perhaps forever – Portland is the place where my heart has felt most at home.  I ached over leaving it, even before I did, in a way I never ever did for California.  I miss so much about it in a purely physical way like I never have for any place in California.  It is my chosen native place.

I was, by many, always an interloper – not a true native for sure – but my heart knew it was home from the first instant I walked outside in the quiet of our first weekend in the state and caught the smallest of snowflakes on my tongue.  As I basked in what would turn out to be the tiniest of winter snowstorms in all my years there, as I looked up at the white-dusted trees in the center lot of our lovely North Portland neighborhood – as I did this carelessly, mindlessly – as I couldn’t be bothered to care if I looked like an idiot or a Californian or whatever.  As I felt lucky, so lucky, to have found this place, knowing so early on that it was just where I needed to be, neck bent and head back, staring up amidst the hushhush of that quiet snowstorm.

It was the exact plot of land where I belonged.  Nothing ever changed that for me, not ever.  It will always be a magical, singular, gorgeous oasis in my mind and my heart.  It is where so much of who I came to be was formed, the years living there merging all the little bits of my past and present into the woman I now know myself to be.  It is where my mind goes when I think of my home place. It will always be the point that magnetizes my heart, the point on a map I look to in order to find which direction everything else emanates from – my center.

And I love where I live now.  I am happy.  It is comfortable and striking and so so sunny.  It is home now.  And I am rooting here, re-rooting, deepening my connection to this place in a very adult way, organically and by conscious design.  But despite this all, California feels like a home away from home.  A place I have chosen to be while I know that my heart would choose elsewhere.  The flight home felt almost void of any physical senses – just a vacuum into which I was trying to throw words so I could understand what it was I felt at all.  And then I realized.  Leaving Portland after this visit felt like I was reaffirming my own exile.  That word loomed large in my mind.  I am in exile.  Of my own choosing, I know, but still.  Exile.

What had at first, so many months ago, felt like I was choosing to go to California suddenly felt like I had instead only chosen to leave Portland.  Leave all of it behind.  That life.  The chaos that erupted there.  The emotional mess I brought with me.  The places I used to go.  The person I used to be.  The people I used to love.  It felt, no matter how stunning and green and familiar, like a place tainted by the end of my time there and what it meant for me through the first half of this year, the whole city troubled with all I could no longer keep space for, all the things I couldn’t hold in my hands or my heart or my head anymore.  Like a home I could never live in again.  Sad, but slightly comforting, too.  This choice – this choice – was right.  Is right.  It’s where I need to be. It’s the place I will live, even if I never feel the kind of inexplicable love for it that I feel for my lost stumptown.

For me, Portland is that girl you meet when you’re young, who you can’t imagine not kissing.  You will kiss her, in fact, if you have to beg and beg and beg and wear her down.  And you will always love her – that tingle in your stomach that spreads into your chest and threatens to open you from the inside when you think of her, no matter how many years later, no matter how different you know she looks now – she will always be that first kiss, that surprising long sweet kiss where you knew you loved her, where you feared how much it would change you at the same time that you wrapped your arm tighter around her and reached your hand up to the nape of her neck to feel where her hair begins, to twist your finger there while you kissed her cheek.

She’s that girl.  But also the girl you have to leave. Who’s right, except. Except that she’s not anymore. Who’s the one, but can’t be. Not anymore. Who you love and love but have to live without.  And so you each move on.  You find another place to hold, to kiss, to whisper to late at night.  And she does, too.  All kinds of other people.  She lets you go.  She changes just enough to let you know she has set you free.  And you’ll try to be friends.  But it’s hard.  You can’t choose how to feel about her.  And you can’t even yet decipher exactly what that feeling is, today, right here, the visit still so vivid in your mind. You know one thing: you feel most sad about not being more sad.  It breaks your heart that you ache less for her.  She’s lovely.  Really fucking beautiful, in fact.  So beautiful sometimes it literally hurts to have left her. You think it should even hurt more, she’s so captivating.  And, but, yet.  It already hurts a little less than it did just a handful of months ago.

And so you are Napoleon on Elba.  Stuck – even if by your own decisions – on this craggy piece of land that feels so far away from there.  And you can’t deny that this rock is stunning, breathtaking in its own way.  Gaspingly gorgeous.  Just last night you looked at the rosy and cloud-hovered San Francisco skyline as you curved around on the 80 heading home at sunset and you nearly lost your breath at how not-old this view gets – at how new it is every time, no matter how many years after first seeing it, how fucking ravishing this place is, every day.  Bridges and buildings and ocean and fog and sun and clouds and wet wet air.  A pink glow rising up and out of the skyline last night – the bridge and all else in dark monochrome. The stuff of postcards and you are simply on the freeway, finishing up an errand, stunned over and over by what you see before your eyes.

This is an amazing lady you sleep with now.  Just as complicated and charming and messy and painterly.  Your new home.  Full of all that will feed you now.  Full of all your future love, your future hopes, your growing-old dreams.  So goodbye, FoHo (and with you, Portland), I will miss you.  You will change, more and always, without me.  Here is my expatriate air kiss to you.  Hang it on an antler and switch on the light of your bedside table.  You own a large part of my heart. You always will.  Even if I have learned how to be, to live, to love somewhere else.  We will catch up over and over and over.  For as long as I am able to, I will seek out the taxidermied shape of your nightlight.  Your Old Town glow and rain-soaked potholes.  Your open heart with a wry, old laugh. Your dark bars with a hippy slant and a foodie’s menu. Your painted over rust-stained awning that shields a shiny powder-coated custom bike rack.  Ex-home.  Ex Isle.  My Stella Marie, my northwestern star.

Moving Forward in Reverse: on leaving Oregon -or- this pain is not figurative

So now that it’s over, can’t we just say goodbye?
I’d like to move on and make the most of the night

Maybe a kiss before I leave you this way

Your lips are so cold, I don’t know what else to say

              – Ozzy Osbourne

And so it is.

I am no longer a resident of Oregon.

I have returned to California.  There is a lot of sun here so far.  I find I enjoy that most days.  My family is close.  I also enjoy that most days.  But Oregon is far, Portland even further.  I still do not like that.  Not on any days, really.

The days leading up to my departure feel like a ball of rubber bands rolling around in my head.  Heavy, knotted up, slightly elastic – but mostly just a jumble of once useful things that have been all wrapped up.

Two weeks before my scheduled departure, I came down with Strep Throat.  What had already started to feel  like the vast platform of time slipping out from under me began to feel like the most unusual mix of speeding forward and time lapse photography.  I was too tired to do anything.  But still I was overcome with anxiety and felt smothered by the stacks and stacks of things left to do.

I hurt too much to pack.  I was too tired to see the people I cared most about.  I missed two days of work in the crucial first week of training my replacement.  I had no choice.  By the time I went to the doctor, five days in, I felt so far behind that I postponed my move by six days.  I bought time, the time I had lost.

Quickly, through the magic of western medicine, I recovered.  I got back to seeing my friends and the people and places I would miss the most.  I got back to work.  I got back to packing.  I was cramming as much into each and every minute that I could.  I had an amazing going away party with my Oregon friends.  A generous and well-(karaoke)endowed friend hosted the event – we sang and laughed and played bingo for blow-up keytars and unicorns.  We cracked open the amazing handmade Oregon piñata Jolie had given me and people went scrambling for faux-diamond encrusted ‘brass’ knuckles and small liquor bottles and blow-up unicorns and squirt guns.  We had coconut cake that was divine and sangria and mojitos that made me a giddy mess by the end of it all.

I had my last trivia night with my viking three and ate an old people’s dinner with Jolie at the hamburger joint we went to for lunch when we first became friends so many years ago.  I went to see Crispin Glover and marveled at the oddity that is him. I laughed and laughed and worried, but mostly I tried to just laugh.

And I also woke up one morning, six days away from Departure Day, with piercing pain in my ear that became, only one day later, a perforated ear drum and then, the next day after that, an allergic reaction to the initial antibiotic made me too dizzy to turn my head and sent me reeling into nausea.  In the middle of those three days, one of my cats passed unexpectedly because of what we can only assume was a heart attack or stroke or some other internal time bomb.  I received news from Fresno of a horrific event in my mother’s home (a topic needing its own space and time to be approached or explained) that left me literally shaking my fist at the sky, like an awful cliche, asking when it would all stop, when it would all ease up and let me breathe, let me think, let me be.

In that last week before I left Oregon, what was hardest on my departure was that I was literally in pain.  All kinds of it.  I had constant piercing pain in my ear.  And my heart hurt – in so many ways.  I was crying for my cat.  He was the youngest of our pets, the only boy and the most lovable, really. I had held his stiff, cold body while sitting on the bottom step of what were once my bedroom stairs and cried.  I stayed inside while my ex buried him out back, my ear pounding too hard to be of any help, the pressure built up in my head too much to bend over, let alone even imagine exerting enough force to lift and then pierce the ground with a shovel.

I baked two dozen cupcakes from scratch and decorated them for a co-worker’s baby shower, trying hard to erase the vision of Like Water for Chocolate and the idea that these cupcakes, which should be all about joy, would be infused with sadness, or worse, stress and anxiety.  I tried to ignore the excruciating pain that was beating a fast rhythm in my ear as I made the German chocolate frosting from scratch – chopping pecans and stirring in coconut. My heart was swollen and tender already and then this violence, this expected yet still tragic outcome of my mother’s mad reckless behavior had me spun in a hundred directions.  What to do about it.  How to feel about it.  What to say about it.  It was, and is still in so many ways, indescribable.  I am still working on that part.  I was full, to the edges of my pores, with confusion and sadness and pain and worry – about moving, about my family, about the missing that was already starting to close in on me, about the now deaf right ear that was oozing and leaking and ringing and hissing and hurting, still really hurting.

A few days before I was to leave, Jolie and her husband came by to pick up the kiln we shared and all of the glass supplies.  We hefted it all up from the basement, cramming as much as we could into their Jeep.  I was having a hard time not carrying my own weight, allowing them to carry more, but the pressure in my ear was pushy and angry and would press harder against my ear the more I lifted, the more I exerted, my own pulse beating loudly in my ear with each pump of my blood.  As we stood in the living room, slowing our breathing and wiping our foreheads, Jolie and I prepared to say our goodbyes.  We are both criers, but privately.  I like to think of us as half-men in that way – stoic publicly but bumbling crybabies in our own homes.  We stood there, not sure what to say and then we hugged and said goodbye and cried.  Briefly.  And then she moved to the door and walked out to the car and I closed the door behind her.  I had said goodbyes to people I cared a lot about at my party, but I was more than a little drunk and definitely high on coconut cake.  This was the first really, really hard goodbye.  This was the true beginning of the end in Portland.

After they left, I packed up my dogs and got on the road to spend another of these last few evenings with the person I had accidentally fallen in love with – with impeccably bad timing and with overwhelmingly strong emotions. The dogs and I got on the road to make the hour drive and I tried desperately to keep it together. It was a Friday night and so there was more evening traffic than there might have been on a different night of the week and I found myself grateful for the red lights ahead of me, for the brightening and lightening of them as people braked and then accelerated.  I could focus on those lights.  I could try not to get lost in my thoughts.  I could try not to think about anything, about everything. I could try not to feel the radiating pain in my body. Or hear how mangled the music was, filtering so unevenly through my ears, or the way my own breathing sounded wrong inside my own head, as though I were forever holding a glass to my ear, eavesdropping on my own muffled thoughts.

I had said my first real goodbye and I was going to miss her like mad.  I was going to miss so much else, too, and saying goodbye to her made it real.  I was leaving.  Not just planning on leaving.  Not just waiting to leave.  I would be gone.  In a few days.  Really, in a matter of hours.  I cried.  And cried.  And dried my eyes and then cried again. I tried desperately not to cry – so that my head would hurt less, so that my eyes would not be so swollen, so when I got to Silverton I would not be a mess, so that I didn’t just go on crying for days and days.  That would come, I knew.  So stop it.

And I watched those red lights in front of me – I slowed and stopped and went and then all of it again.  I thought of my mother and whether I needed to see her when I got to California.  Yes, I decided. And so I cried some more.  I stopped and dried  my eyes and focused on the road.  I thought of my friends and this love and being so far away from it all.  I cried.  And stopped.  I changed the cotton ball in my ear more times than I could count in that time and looked at the bag of cotton balls on the passenger seat full of clean cotton balls, pulled apart into neat little halves so that they would tuck into my ear just so, and looked at the cup in my cup holder that held the ones I would need to throw out. It was disgusting and I was disgusted by it.  I was leaking, making a mess of things, trying to stopper myself like a leaky pipe.

I started to feel that my pain, my heart and brain and soul pain, my sadness over needing to leave Portland had come to life in my body and had ruptured my ear, was literally oozing from me, seeping from my head, forcing me to see it and deal with it and live with it.  I was hurting.  For real.  With injuries doctors could measure.  I was waking up over and over to pain – enough that I would rifle through the refrigerator in the wee hours of the morning to find anything to eat so that I could take one more ibuprofen, one more Tylenol with codeine.  My body was railing against me, fighting me, making this all as impossibly hard as it could.  This pain was stealing my romantic notion of what it would mean to leave.  My body was screaming at me, throbbing at me, exploding with its refusal to allow it to be easy.

I spent my last week not being heard – my own voice huge in my head, but small and almost invisible to everyone else.  I spent that last week only half hearing the people around me.  Even when I turned my ‘good ear’ to them, even when I said (often in my best old man voice) ‘eh?’.  It was as though they were already half gone.  I was already half gone.  The gap between us already widening even as I sat next to them.  Even as we shared a meal.  Even as we laid on the couch together and stayed awake just so as not to lose the night to sleep.

Leaving, really leaving, was hard.  Almost impossible.  I bought myself one extra day in Oregon – my ear throbbing and keeping me awake and even more so after packing up all of my belongings and trying to help carry them out to the POD. And so, when the opportunity presented itself, I hung on for one more night. I spent one last, unexpected evening in Silverton –  allowed myself twenty-four hours of nothing to do but be. It was the most perfect standstill in the middle of the chaos and I didn’t want it to end.

When it came time to leave the next morning, after an excruciating and nearly silent goodbye only an hour before, it was just me and my dogs standing in the middle of a house that was not ours but had become quickly familiar.  I gathered our stuff.  I rested my bag of cotton balls on the passenger seat and made sure everything was in the car.  I went back in for the dogs and I said through sobs – to the air, to the walls, to myself, in the muffled way I now heard my own voice – why am I doing this? Why?


Eventually, in what was only minutes, really, but felt like more – I was on the road.  I was cruising south on I-5 heading for California.  It was a bright-blue-sky-in-Oregon kind of day and I tried hard not to cry.  I changed out my cotton ball a couple of times and then pulled it out.  My ear did what it had every time I had done this in the last few days – it crackled and picked up sounds at varying volumes – giving the impression that I had a clicking gremlin in my right ear.  Like feedback from my own brain. It was maddening and disorienting, but not so painful anymore. It was Son of Sam annoying yet fascinating in its strangeness.

And I had stopped oozing.  Almost completely.  I still couldn’t hear and the pain was still there, but I could feel it sloping down into discomfort, into doesn’t this feel weird, into dammit I wish I could hear.  My ear seemed to be crossing over, shifting into healing, into something (hopefully) closer to normal as I moved further and further away from the life I had. I thought Here I am.  Here I go.  Here I come.

I held it together, mostly.  I cried.  I certainly did.  But not as much as I thought I might.  I had suffered the pain of leaving, I was still suffering it, but not just with tears.  Maybe I was just too worn out for all that superfluous crying.  Maybe I had leaked too much to cry.  But when I saw the sign that says Oregon thanks you – Come back soon, when I saw those words against that kelly green state silhouette, I melted.  I sobbed and sobbed and felt the weight of my next visit actually being a visit.  I had left.  Almost a decade of my life on the other side of that sign.  A lot of life.  A whole, complete, finished chapter.  A person in a place that is now past.

I’ll be back soon, I told myself.  I’ll visit so often it won’t even feel like I left, I tried to tell myself.  But all I had were tears – big sobbing ones.  And then I saw the checkpoint just across the state line.  I had forgotten about it.  So I dried up, stopped pouring out tears and then I was simply ushered through.  Can’t you see I’m dying here? I thought melodramatically.  I was, in reality, glad they didn’t notice or care.

Suck it up, Californian.  This is where you are.  And it is bittersweet. It is lovely and tart and right where you belong even if you want to be somewhere else at the same time and that is impossible.  You have family shit to deal with and a business to start and a home to find and three small boys to hold who will soon, before you even know it, be way too gangly and long to fit on your lap, and eventually, too old and cool to love you so obviously and affectionately.  So suck it up.  More than that – enjoy it. This is home.  Now.  Here.

I’ve come back to you, California.  Please don’t hold a grudge. I love you, too, even if I love Oregon.  You are both my tender-hearted loves – one sun and one rain, one blue and white and one green and gray.  I love you both, individually, even while I wish that, through magic and conjuring and pure desire, I could meld you into my perfect perfect place. My love for Oregon hit me so hard before I left that my ear drum exploded.  Please be nice, for now, my home state.  I can’t take anymore pain. I can’t afford anymore open wounds. I am here now, almost healed, but still healing. Take care, California.  Be kind.

Another Year, Another Foggy Forecast

All photos in this post by Jolie Griffin

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity . . .
 
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
                         – T.S. Eliot (Little Gidding I & II)

Here it is: 2011.  2010 is gone . . . even though everything that happened in that upturned year of my life is still holding me afloat in this new one.  Whether afloat is a sign of surviving or a sign of still being kicked around by the tide is a matter of moment by moment opinion.  I am half gone from this city I love, half done with things I should have lined up or finished weeks ago, half submerged in a whole new unknown job, foot half out the door of the one here in Portland, half-insane for allowing myself to fall in love in a time marked only by departure and distance, half-cocked in this half-packed house that is driving one of my dogs into full-blown anxiety. I have half a dozen half-finished blog posts because I can’t seem to sit long enough to finish any given one – my mind a half-blown tool scattered too wide.  I am more than half happy and more than half sad and am unable to figure out how both of those things can be true – but find I am mostly unwilling to try too hard to unpack that puzzle. I am both. I just am. In nearly overwhelming amounts.

But I am here: standing, living, falling when I thought maybe I could no longer find that place, grieving so many things that might not even deserve to be grieved but that gently break my heart nonetheless.  My sister is alive and learning how to live.  My family is, mostly, in tact and pulling together, readying for a geography that feels a lot like love. I have so many, many friends who are each such crazy, loving, reachable people that I sometimes dizzy with the thought of all of them – swaying closer, swaying further, but always orbiting and circling and checking in.  I have so many people that I don’t know what to do with my love for them – but even if nearly overcome by it, will not bear the giving up of them in any way except the most necessary – a move away from a handful of people who have been my most tapped touchstones, my sturdiest anchors when I was seasick and green.  The ones who help me through even when they don’t lend an ear, even when I don’t ask them to, even when they have no idea that they are helping – by being, by caring, by existing.  I am the most broke I have been in a long, long time and yet I don’t, in the most cliche of ways, feel poor.

Maybe because there is too much going on, too much in my brain, too much loss and love (new and old and vanishing) in my heart . . . maybe because of all this, I let midnight on the 31st pass without my usual thoughtful reflection of the year that came before and the intentional framing of how I would face the next one. A tried and true ritual where I pause to orient myself, to understand, to make sense and then turn to face the new year. Probably because this is all I have done in the last year I didn’t even think to stop, to pause and reflect, during those last few days of December.  Perhaps I have done so much of that thinking and crying and wishing and planning and mourning so that all I have left to do is step into this year. Walk into it. As bravely and as fearlessly and as boldly as I can.  I have never been one for lukewarm emotions or lukewarm intentions – so here I am 2011.  Don’t do me wrong.  I will wear you out with fun if you let me. I will love you like mad if you just treat me right.  Listen to Pat Benatar.  She is wiser than you might know.

Last week, I drove past the patch of land that was my cafe and was taken back, physically and emotionally, to last January.  To holding the drill in my hand and setting it on counter-clockwise and reversing every 2″ wood screw out of the back wall, pulling apart the intricately puzzled pieces of doors. To climbing up on the step ladder to reach the pieces from the top of the dividing wall whose screws were stripped.  To taking the claw end of the hammer and leveraging myself, carefully, balanced precariously on a thin strip of flimsy metal, slowly ripping each wooden piece from the frame.  I could feel the weighing out of each item – to keep, to sell, to give away.  Each thing a specific memory – not simply a pale green demitasse, but the exact one I chose, bought and unpacked and washed and placed beneath a portafilter spout to watch for the perfect wobbly stream of espresso and crema – a cream tinged deep amber dancing against the heat and water and air. I could feel the exact pounds of each table as my last trusty barista and I carried them out to the sidewalk and set up to sell it all off – this place I had made and was only a little sad to leave.

I remembered feeling the weight of it, even then.  The significance of that change – pulling apart what I had made and what had failed – had failed to succeed, to thrive, to make me happy, to give me the freedom I wanted.  I knew, in every dismantling moment, that I was in the middle of an enormous shift in my life.  I was making decisions, I was making changes, I was crafting a whole new life.  I knew what I was doing and thought I knew, mostly, what was to come.  

But I didn’t.  I had no idea. Not a clue.  Events unfolded, moments happened, that flipped everything upside down and sent me sailing through the kind of choices that leave nothing unturned.  I thought of that woman, poised to change her life, and almost laughed at how little she imagined she was about to change.  I laugh at how half-ass that kind of change would have been compared to the actual tumbling of 2010 as it wore away the outer layer of pretty much everything I thought I knew. The skin rashing slide against the pavement of last year’s circumstances. The turmoil about to push that woman through months and months of gut wrenching choices.

She was ready.  For what she didn’t even know was coming.  

So I give up, this year, on guessing what will be next year. I feel much the same this January as I did last.  A lot of the very same motions as I pack up my house and my memories and my stuff – touching it all and remembering so much more than I may want to in any given moment. I stop myself when I start to imagine – as I did exactly one year ago – that the beginning of this year will be rough, will mean changes and sadness and loss, but also gain and intention and love. Yes – the beginning will surely mean all of those things.  But as to what else?  I can’t know.  And I can’t bear to think it will be a repeat of 2010 in any significant way, but I will sail forward into that possibility, unlocked.  I will walk forward – toward it – and trust that 2011 will at least be quieter.  Will at least be simpler, even if only slightly.  Will at least be as much laughing as I somehow fit into that treacherous year of my life that has finally ended. I am a weather vane without direction, but I can sway and point and shift.  I am ready.  For whatever.  

 

So here’s a toast to this new year:

May you laugh with me or at me or next to me.  May we cry only when it’s really necessary and then, as often as possible, together – whether in print or in spirit or holding each other through sobs.  May we drink until our toes hurt but never ever have to hold each other’s hair back – because we are, really, way too old for that.  But may we never feel so old that we forget who we were and who we can always be – those girls, those boys, those children who railed against the world, but trusted each other implicitly – with our lives, with our hearts and with our bodies.  May we close the gaps time has created and help each other stitch the cuts that appear this year, suture them for each other when it can’t be done ourselves, gently press the skin together and hold it there to make the smallest, faintest scar possible.  May we love – long and hard and fast – with all of the weight we can give it.  May we live – another year, another ring beneath our bark, another line on our face, our flesh another inch closer to the ground.  

Raise a glass to yourself – raise it to your people – raise it to the world that can not stop spinning.  Raise it to the difference you have made for me – last year and probably many before. To the difference you will surely make for me this year and so, so many more to come. Here we are, 2011. Salud. 

And Here Is Where The End Begins

An opportunity came down the pipeline this week that sets up a general time frame for my move to California.  Regardless of the house sale, I will be relocating at the beginning of the year – perhaps juggling half of a mortgage and settling into a new place all at once.  I am grateful that this opportunity has come up – like a hand appearing out of nothingness to pull me out of this nowhere place, this between, to set me on the forward motion of future. It is perfect timing, a coalescing of things that makes my decision feel even more right, even more destined.

So limbo is slowly revving its engine, getting ready to leave town. I’ve practically loaded its bags in the car and told it to take off before the traffic gets really bad, before I lift it up and set it in the driver’s seat myself and place a brick on the accelerator, aiming it right for the highway.

The things that are static and unsure in my life are still piled high – stacked on my porch like firewood waiting for the ice and cold of winter – but there is a light.  A dim, winter’s light, but a beacon nonetheless.  I can plan.  I can plot.  I can start to slide the puzzle pieces together and see how they look.  I can stop ruminating and percolating and just thinking and thinking and waiting.  I can do. Man, I love me some doing.

What I don’t love is this knot in my stomach, this fullness and hunger all at once.  A lump settling into my throat forcing me to swallow with real intention, to push past it and breathe in.  Limbo meant longer with Portland. Limbo meant longer with my friends here.  Limbo meant I could be frustrated and irritated about not being able to move forward, but it also meant I could sit here, somewhat leisurely, and enjoy this place, these people and have every excuse for taking full advantage of all that I love here.  Doing means leaving. And I am not at all happy about that today.

Maybe I am just melancholy today.  It is cold – really, really cold in my office today, was really cold when I woke up in my house (the thermostat not yet programmed for this season, this schedule) and while it is sunny right now, my hands are cold, my feet are cold, my nose is cold.  My hoodie has remained on and zipped up all day – I imagine I could still put on another sweatshirt and not be warm enough. And I have been tired the last few days.  Really, really tired. Stinging sleepy eyes and legs that only want to tuck up under me on the couch, only want to settle in with a book and a blanket. I’m sure it’s the shift in the weather and it’s the recovering from all the good times, but it’s all making me feel a bit old, more than a bit weary.

Maybe it’s the writer in me.  A writer knows that all things come together, all things that the story will be remembered for (all the lingering emotions) happen in the dénouement – in that unwinding of the story, in that lovely slope of the drawn out end. If the climax was my decision to move – the drama and tears and excitement of all that – then this is truly the beginning of the end, the start of the ending – and the weight of it is immense.  I know this about story: it all sings here, it all ties together or falls apart or just vanishes without a trace, this is the part of the story that molds and shapes everything that came before – the real craft, the true art, is here, in the end.  All of what came before can be beautiful and lovely and full of grace notes and shining details, but if the end – the whole, delicate end – does not work, then the story falls apart and becomes an exercise, a tortuous writing exercise that you must push aside to start anew. All that work is reduced to a collection of details and words and symbols without anywhere to put them, any way to make sense of them, any way to pick them up and hold them in your hand.

Dramatic, I know.  Melodramatic, yes.  But this is how it feels today.  My Portland.  My Portland people. I feel you moving backwards, away from me, pulling back like a fake movie backdrop rolling back to sound stage one. I am not ready for this story to end.  I know it must, but damn it is sad, my god it feels too heavy today.  I don’t feel up to bearing your absence right now.  I just don’t want to today.

I will have more time.  I know this. The lovely gray of October mornings – that thinnest sheet of ice or mist on your car – and then the day breaking into the unexpected sun glow of what feels like a whole, stolen summer day crammed into the two or three hours it lasts.  The cold that hurts at first but means that it is almost time to light a fire, to slow cook a stew, to tear open a crusty loaf of bread and curl up on the floor in front of the fireplace with your dog and listen to the rain fling itself up against your window like a rag doll come to life, trying to force itself into your house. I miss these things already – painfully – and they have not yet happened this year. I am mourning them and yet I will be here for them – but for the last time, for only this October and then, probably, no more Portland Octobers.

I am mourning, early and fully, today. The spring I will not be here for – that bitterly cold darkness breaking out in tulips everywhere, knowing the cold is not gone, but look – there – red and yellow and purple – like weeds along the roads and filling up yards and even popping up in lawns.  So striking and colorful they almost look fake. The onslaught of March rain, the hem of your pants so soaked they may not dry before evening, even if you work inside, even if you sit near a heating vent.  The vision of hooded or hatted folks, umbrella-less, pushing their chins to their chest to walk along the sidewalk, watching their feet and the sidewalk and occasionally looking up, eyes half-closed against the wet to check their progress.  The teasing of summer – its quick April, May and June visits before sailing down on us in July like a dry sauna we’ve stood in line for all year long.  The clarity of the Portland sky – so blue, so cloudless for just a while, so bright that our cave eyes take a moment to adjust, for our pupils to shrink down enough to stop squinting.  I can feel these things not happen and it feels like a whole lot of loss, like such a high price today. 

Not too high, not so high that I will have to change my mind, make an about face and abandon the future I have chosen, but high enough to break my heart more than a little. I know I will live without living through these things again.  I know I will visit.  I know this, but today it just feels like not enough.  I still have time – to enjoy the eventual ‘arctic blast’, to enjoy Halloween and the gorgeous days that October always offers, like shiny wrapped gifts that turn us all into giddy children released from school for the day.  To walk outside and stand under the November rain (no Axl Rose sadness, just the showers of Northwest fall that are so much softer and lighter than the pounding rain of January or February).  To visit my favorite coffee shops and restaurants and bars.  To make a short list of things I have not yet done that will be whittled down from the longer list of things I will not be able to do in time.  I will not have driven to Central Oregon.  I will not have driven to Mt. St. Helens.  I will not have organized the Strip-a-thon/Bake Sale/Karaoke From Hell Fundraiser Extravaganza.

I will finish, slowly, packing up the rest of my belongings.  I will think of my family and how much more time we will have together, how many more small things I can be a part of, those tiny things of everyday life that add up to all of our best memories.  I will remember that two of my friends enjoy frequent free airline tickets and so I will force them to visit. A lot.  I will try to savor every minute spent doing something Portland, something odd and usual and small-big-town. I will try not to sink under the weight of this decision – the reality of it washing over me so sudden and so heavy – this is real, I am doing this.

I will not feel like this for long, definitely not forever, maybe not even tomorrow.  But today is for wallowing in this, I suppose – I don’t know that today I can even choose not to. I need to allow myself this mourning, the space and time to be sad for all that is ending, all that I am leaving.  And here is the true rub.  I have put off so many things, so many final endings, until the move. Until I needed to. Until I had to.  So much more is ending than my time living in Portland.  There are things I have allowed myself, people I have allowed myself, old habits I have allowed myself, until the move. I have postponed some really hard choices in the name of not needing to yet, in the name of holding on just a little while longer, in the name of not being able to handle it on top of everything else.

And this place, that I love, that I adore, is also all wrapped up in the life I used to have, in the love I used to have, in the jobs I used to have.  This place is where I went – motherless, fatherless, almost family-less – and created a life, created a place to be and live and love, the two of us creating our own place in the world, our own little homestead in the green of the valley. It really was where I became my very own person, but next to someone, learning to be (without kin) and to compromise and to love in the grown-up way of real world sacrifice. I am actually (I am?) going to leave the house that I have been in for longer than any other house or apartment in my entire life. I almost don’t believe any of it will really happen. How can I craft an ending that will do all of these endings justice, that will capture all the strands of my life that are tying off and being left behind, slipped into that category of past, of no longer?

It does feel like the end of an era – of almost a decade in one place, of what I thought would be many more decades – the end of a person I was and only partially still am.  I can feel the dividing line in time slowly drawing itself across the desert of my life.  There.  In the sand.  Step over it and it is done.

I can’t stop this line.  I can’t stop who I have become, who I have been during this whole time of limbo and transition, the good and the so-so and the could be better.  I can only try to be better, good, forgiving, strong – to take the best of it all and bravely drop the rest, however painful, however hard. I can’t stop this future from sailing forward, at whatever speed it chooses –  or stop the cousins of limbo from dragging some of this out, of camping out illegally in my driveway and siphoning some of my electricity.

But I can spend time doing stuff – anything – with friends.  I can let myself miss things that are not gone yet as long as I also enjoy the things that are still happening. As long as I don’t wallow too long, cry too much, don’t let the weariness settle in and anchor me down, push my head under so low that I can’t see the star filled fall nights that are more than brisk, more than cool – just so shockingly clear and cold and sparkling.  As long as I also remember to look up, to look all around and mark it all in my brain, wrap it all inside the folds, nestle the details in my memory to help me through the long, perhaps lonely, nights of making a whole new life in an old/new place.

I will try very hard to love every minute and not miss it (too much) until it is past, until it is truly gone.  I will try to not weight the end over the middle, over the years and years of details, of outings and innings and the ridiculously good times of this place, this pocket of the continent that I adore, this oasis for my soul, this place that saved me when I needed it to, loved me back when I wanted it to. But I won’t be able to help myself, sometimes, and I will try to write the best ending I can, look at the shape of what has happened before and see where the laces are loose and where they are taut, see where the threads are struggling to come together and what they mean, what they are pointing toward. I will try to get my ass up and warm my hands and feel less old, less tired.  I will do this.  Not today, though. Today I will stare at this vast panoramic of my Portland, roll around in the worn, rose scented sheets of my personal love affair with this unusual lady, remember her smell and her feel and her breath even as I am still with her. I know that someday soon I will have to turn around and walk away, drive away, crying as Oregon thanks me for visiting, that green sign literally marking my passage from here to there.  But today? Today, I will love her achingly. And she will let me.

Must Be 50 Ways (& every one of ’em hurts)

Shortly after declaring my undying love for Portland, I have decided that I must leave it.  No shit.  Love ’em & leave ’em swankyD – that’s me. Really Portland, it’s not you, it’s me.  I love you, baby, but I just can’t stay.  I’ll hop on the bus, Gus and I’ll try not to be coy, Roy. I’ve made a new plan, Stan and it really has nothing to do with being free.  Because, you know, (wait for it . . . ) freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Everywhere I turn it seems I’ve got something to lose. Something, also, to gain, of course. But the difficulty is always in the losing.

I know I am making the right decision to be closer to my family.  I can feel it’s right in the very marrow of my being.  I fought against it being right and lost.  Where I live is the very last static thing in my life during 2010.  So why not explode that, too?  Why not change every last little thing about my life while I am wielding the wrecking ball?  Why stop short? Painful or not, it’s right and it’s right and it’s right.

Part of me fears I’m just getting really good at walking away.  The rest of me knows that I am also going back to – a city I have loved (yes, I called her a mistress, but sometimes you do leave your wife for her, sometimes you just have to, even if you find that you truly do love them both), back to a state that is home in so many ways, to my family and old friends, to a sense of responsibility that is beckoning to me – not in a nagging or pejorative way, but like a grandmother’s song while she stands at the stove – comforting and familiar.

I have cried a lot through this decision.  I’ve rubbed my eyes raw and woken up with bee-stung eyelids that obscured my vision.  On either side I win – but, sadly, on either side I lose.  I have found myself weighing the losses – holding out both palms and trying to imagine the exact weight of each little thing and each big thing (friendships that will withstand but will be changed, whose details will shift, moved to that column of long distance).  I have cried the wracking sobs of catching your breath and making sounds even when you try not to – the kind that when you see it in a movie you think might just be bad acting, but when you have just done it, you know it is real.  I also feel a straightening in my spine that can only be coming from my body knowing that it’s heading home and drifting back to a place more safely situated to my anchors, my loves – my body’s very stature shifting to balance out the weight lost from what some days have felt like endless tears.

Since officially making the decision weeks ago, I feel as though I am slowly detaching from Portland.  My move is months away at best and so the process is slow and uncertain – in limbo at least until I am no longer strapped to a mortgage and a job that I can’t just bail on, not in good conscience.  In this oddly almost-weightless state, the things I love about Portland feel so bitingly bittersweet.  I see the river as I cross it on the Ross Island and I try to remember how I feel about the bay – is it close, is it anywhere near the same feeling?  I see the way the city stretches out and the green everywhere around me and try to imprint it in my brain. Try to remember the green spaces in San Francisco, try to remember Dolores Park or the bench near the small lake in Golden Gate park that was my favorite spot when lost inside my own head, the place on the wall at Twin Peaks that always made me feel  more grounded. I try to conjure the things I love about San Francisco at the same time that I gaze at the most endearing parts of Portland, my attention constantly split, shifting back and forth between.

Portland to me has always seemed a little like San Francisco stretched out and pulled across a larger, flat piece of land – where the canvas would tear, where there would not be enough to cover the square footage, green filled in.  Everything has more space.  Everything has more green.  Everything is a little shorter and easier to see around and over and through. And San Francisco, since living in Portland, began to seem to me like a distilled, condensed, fortified version of Portland – a watery Portland that was boiled and reduced and hardened – a dark caramel brittle city.  All of the people working more quickly, more heatedly, picketing with bigger signs and bigger results.  Like a dirtier, grayer, beautiful pressure cooker version of Portland – hot and fast and sexy.

In these last few weeks, what I see in Portland is an amplified, volume turned up to 11 rendition of all the ways it is unique and different and weird.  SF is weird, that’s for sure.  But not Portland weird.  It’s as though we have more time and space to really ponder and think up our weirdness.  We can ruminate and germinate and gestate our weirdness – give it some acreage to spread out and grow organic and wild.  We can take the time to weld what looks like a million bicycle frames together and take the time to get on and off of that monstrous contraption and ride on streets flat enough and sparsely populated enough to make it a spectacle, but not as big a danger as it would be on Market or Lombard or Mission. Portland’s ponderous, hand-crafted weirdness makes me ache, makes me yearn for it even while I am staring it in the face.

I feel lately that I am in the middle of giving Portland the longest ever kiss goodbye – like my lips are locked and won’t let go.  Not to breathe.  Not to pull back and look into Portland’s eyes.  Not to pause and recognize that it’s too early for this. Not to say to myself, not yet. There’s still plenty of time.  I am trying to find a way to stop this feeling.  I need to stop feeling this way, need to stop kissing like it’s the last time.  Before my lips chap. Before I pass out.  Before it hurts more and longer than it has to.  I need to pat Portland on the back and let her go on about her business and make some plans with her.  Hang out.  Have dinner.  Sing.

It’s like I’m breaking up in advance when I need to savor all the time we have together.  It will hurt enough when the time comes, but that goodbye will at least be followed immediately with a new home, a new start, the going back to a salve for the walking away. So back up, Portland – because you know I can’t. Be the stronger one. Stop kissing me back.  Put your hands on my shoulders and gently push me just far enough away to see your face, all of it. I’m still here. Help me remember that.  The rest will come later. That kiss will be waiting – sad and sweet and tear-filled. And then we will see that we each can go on living – separate and distant and happy.  But for now, let’s just hold hands.

My Sweet Dirty Girl, Portland: City of My Heart (River Like My Soul)

*Collaborative post. Photos by Bettie Newell

Portland is the city of roses. It is the city of bridges. It is the land of bicycles. It is, I would say, the adult entertainment capital of the country – Vegas has nothing on us. It is hippy-ville. It is the land of fixed gear, skinny-panted, mustache-sporting hipsters. It is too white. It is wet and green and often grey. It is lush and fertile and often slimy and mossy. It is a liquid city – rain, river, beer and coffee. And it is the city of my heart – the one piece of land to build a cabin in my ribcage and light its fire, cozying up to the heat in my blood and holding on.

I visited Portland when I was a child – stayed with an aunt and uncle I had seen only a handful of times in my life. My great-grandmother, Nanny, and I took a Greyhound bus for fourteen hours from Fresno and then rode in my uncle’s car out to some neighborhood (turns out to be only six blocks from my own house now) to stay at Paul and Gisela’s house. I refused to eat venison and learned how to play poker during that trip. I really only remember the interior of that house – the shag carpet and brown plaid couch and dark wood dining room table where I believed I was legitimately earning my pile of pennies, one great hand at a time. The whole city was reduced to that small 1960’s ranch home in my nine-year-old mind.

When it came time to decide where to move to next – I had returned to Fresno from San Francisco to finish college and what was meant to be two years and one degree turned into five years and two degrees – we made a short list of cities comprised solely of places we had heard good things about. My partner and I had each lived in San Francisco, and when I moved away from the City, I was sure I would return. In the intervening years, however, my desires morphed and I wanted somewhere I could afford to live without either working three jobs or living with five roommates. For me, living in San Francisco had always meant living in San Francisco – not in some outlying Bay Area city – and over the years it took me to finish school, the reality of moving back became less and less attractive.

In anticipation of graduating in June, I made plans to visit Portland in August and had visions of cool streets shaded by canopies of trees, of cool breezes and chilly nights – wearing jeans and long sleeves in August was a luxurious prospect to two Fresno girls. When we arrived, it was during a (usual for that time of year) heat wave and the temperatures were right near 100. The sidewalks seemed dusty and hot and dry. Everywhere we drove, the lawns were all brown and dead. None of the streets made sense. We were lost as much as we weren’t. Signs would lead you halfway to somewhere and then no more signs would appear. People seemed grouchy. We were grouchy. It was not what we expected and certainly not what we wanted out of our next home. As days passed, though, the temperature dropped and we ventured into more and more green spaces. We heard from locals that the summers could be hot, but only for a few days at a time and only ever as hot as we had already endured. We began to see glimpses of the real Portland, visiting each quadrant and daydreaming about our lives here. As a bonus, one of my closest friends had moved here and we stayed with her in North Portland while we were visiting. She provided an anchor in a town further away from family than I had ever moved and her neighborhood gave me a (somewhat false) sense of diversity in Portland that made it feel like home.

We jumped quickly and with confidence. We came back in December to secure housing and packed up our cars and animals and all of our belongings and drove up here two days after Christmas in 2001. Our first few months were the grayest time of year here and we were surprised at how beautiful they were anyway. We drove out to the Gorge and explored the falls – the heavy mist of Multnomah Falls wetting our faces and our clothes and making us so cold that we had to sit in the car with the heat on high for five minutes to stop shivering enough to drive home. It snowed, the most pathetic of snow storms, a month after we moved here and we ran outside to try to form snowballs, to catch snowflakes on our tongues. I loved the drizzle and cloud cover and the way that a few hours of sunshine would make people walk around like smiling morons, faces turned up to the sky and skin warm with the sun. I loved the politics and the consciousness and the freedom of Portland after spending so many years stranded (by choice) back in Fresno after thinking I would never live there again. Portland was the political and moral oasis I always wanted. This was my place. These were my people. This was home.

Over the years, my relationship with Portland has matured – as any long-term relationship is prone to do – but my love for this city has only grown deeper. I can see its flaws. I can see its weaknesses. Some of them are gaping and ugly. We shoot too many people here. We (in a white liberal delusion) pretend we are inclusive and diverse. We don’t do enough to protect our children. We do way too many hard drugs. We do too little for our mentally ill. Still I love its beauty and its soul and its wide open heart. I admire its loud screaming voice with a polite greeting and a friendly farewell. I adore its fervor and generosity and seediness and grit. Whereas I have come to see San Francisco as my dirty little mistress – my first love that is hard to let go of, who I want to visit every once in while (and not tell Portland), who I want to stay up too late and drink too much with, who only ever sees me with eyeliner smeared as I stumble home at five in the morning – she is not who I trust with my deepest desires, not who I tell my darkest secrets or who puts their hand to my forehead to check for fever when I am sick – those things are for Portland, my love, my heart’s desire, the staid and true city.

My first year here, I would see new pockets of the city, see new angles from familiar places, see the smallest architectural detail or natural phenomenon and my heart would, literally, swell. I was sure, in that first year, in that time it took to live through all four seasons that I would someday cease to be so rapt. I knew that the way light – even the little bit seeping through heavy cloud cover in February – made rain-soaked streets and sidewalks glisten would eventually get old. I was sure that the way grass and tulips and weeds seem to shoot out of the ground overnight like Jack’s beanstalk after the first sunny spell in spring, eventually that would seem ho-hum. But weekly, if not daily, something beautiful or striking or imperfectly Portland catches my eye and makes me feel grateful to have made this place home. I’ve even grown immensely fond of our dead summer lawns – the most natural of things that at first was so foreign to this girl from an (overly) irrigated desert. Those dormant brown patches are little reminders of what is to come – the magnificent green of Fall, like a second Spring, lawns and plants and weeds reviving as the temperature drops ever-so-slightly.

No matter how many times in a week it happens, I still love crossing the Ross Island Bridge. Even after so many thousand of times it doesn’t get old to come through the regular-ness of Powell Boulevard, especially if you’ve come around the curve of 17th avenue – past the brown and orange TriMet garage, like a building bussed in from 1972, past the train tracks and the shopping carts and the scattered sleeping bags, past the machine shops and roofing businesses to merge onto Powell, that wide, dirty freeway of a road. I love heading west toward the bridge – past the Shell station and Jack in the Box and Sock Dreams and whatever strip club is occupying the wood shingled island of a bar in that odd little triangle of land right before everyone merges onto the bridge (this week it’s the Lucky Devil – and it is, to be so close to the river, so close to the bridge). You drive through all of this and find yourself on the Ross Island with its almost frighteningly low sides that afford you a clear view of the city and the river and the space between – you find yourself in the open, able to see the rippling of the Willamette River and downtown sprawled out on the horizon.

Looking to the right, you see Big Pink, the rose hued building just beyond the layers and layers of bridges. In front of that, the I-5 Marquam bridge – so freeway like – each layer topped with little tiny toy cars moving like blood in those junior high biology movies about the circulatory system. And past all that concrete and motion you see all of the other short and tall buildings whose corporate names – Koin Center, US Bancorp Tower, Wells Fargo Center – do nothing to highlight their beauty, their stature and grace in front of the tree covered backdrop of the west hills and Forest Park. Pill Hill is straight ahead, like some movie mental asylum perched on a lush green hill (oddly old and modern and futuristic all in one). NCNM just below that and to the right, like an old brick schoolhouse on steroids, spreading the gospel of natural healthcare nationally from this small little block near the river, literally schooling the naturopathic nation. Ross Island to the south, miniscule beaches and green trees and perhaps a boat with a crane, returning the sand mined from the (barely) island so many decades ago, and if you look close enough, if you’re lucky enough to see it, if your eyes are that magnificent, you’ll spy a bald eagle protecting its nesting ground. Then the newest buildings on the west side of the bridge – glittery and shiny and reflective – like a gaudy diamond ring on a hand full of silver and turquoise.

Every time I drive back into the center of town from the Southwest, driving north on Barbur, I fall prey to the illusion that I am suddenly lost in the woods. As I curve around the section of Barbur that runs parallel to the Terwilliger Curves, those lanky up-stretched trees whose trunks are covered in vibrant green ivy trick me into believing I am not in a city at all, but am traveling to or from the mountains I grew up near. If it happens to be sunny, the cool dark lushness of that stretch feels like a relaxing sigh while your shoulders and neck un-tense and roll downward. And then there is the bridge, the messy merging on that is always somehow easier when traffic is at its worst – a Portlander’s manners working overtime when you literally have to take turns rolling on to the bridge, reminding me of the organized rush of a rollercoaster line, people moving to the left so you can rush in on the right, in measured numbers, with careful steps. Coming this way on the Ross Island Bridge, you see the last industrial lot left standing on the west side of the bridge. All of the large steel and metal pieces look strewn from up high on the bridge, look to a non-mechanical person like me as though a very large child tossed all of his toys off of the side of the bridge during a tantrum. I love the colors of rusted and weathered metal so close to the dark wet soil of the riverbank.

On a sunny day, no matter which of the central bridges I take (and particularly if it is one of those magic warm and sunny spring days that feel deserved and stolen all at once) the sight of the Willamette glistening in the sun, the sparkle of light against the water and the boats you can see in any direction, amaze me and make me feel lucky to be here. I love water. I love bridges. I live in a city where I can cross any number of bridges across a river that divides the town in half and see rippling movement and the baseness of nature – where air and water dance. Seeing jet boats and sailboats and dragon boats while running a basic errand, crossing a river wide enough to seem substantial yet narrow enough to see both sides in one sweeping glance, fills me with a child-like awe and gratitude.

Once in a while – especially when life throws me a curve ball, when big change happens in my life – I ponder moving back to California. I am the only one in my family to move away and I now have not only my adult family, but three nephews whose smiles can make me forget anything else for the moment that their wide open faces are looking up at me. I think that maybe I am missing their lives, missing all of the small moments that make up who they will become. I believe you can be happy anywhere – can make happy anywhere – but when I think of leaving Portland, it is like thinking about leaving my legs behind. I am sure that if I ever move away from Portland, there will be some sort of phantom pain shooting through my limbs for the rest of my life, an empty space where my heart waits for Portland to come back to me.

When I take the bus home from work, it crosses the Steel Bridge right after stopping at the Rose Quarter – that odd glass and concrete cluster of buildings that reminds me of Los Angeles for the one block that it lasts – (excepting all those bike lanes and the old fashioned Portland streetlights) it is all cement and neon and crowds, sports and concerts and events. After that boring, any-city place, the bus drives past the last light before the bridge. It drives past the back of a large silo-style building, a mass of round concrete shapes shoved together with an aluminum building oddly perched on top, like a giant picked up an industrial shop, stretched it out to a ridiculously long shape and then set it down for a moment and forgot it there. The back of this hodge-podge looking building is painted with a giant mural of three Trailblazers and Greg Oden stares you down (tastefully, thankfully, clothed in his uniform) along with two of his teammates. All three pairs of eyes following you in the creepiest of ways if you keep looking while the bus moves forward – and then, when you look away and free yourself from their collective gaze, the river opens up before you. You can see off toward the St. Johns Bridge, can see the Steel Bridge (one of my very favorites, the way it cradles the railroad tracks below like a caring mother who has swaddled her young) – can see it shadowed by the eerie Fremont Bridge and surrounded by the colorful condos flanking the west side of the river. You can see the cranes on the east side of the bridge and the large tanker docked right there – loading or unloading or just sitting there – and the water stretching off to the north, moving north, defying gravity and logic.

I am always wowed, at least a little, by the river and adore the mix of industrial and commercial and recreational. The debris caught at the edge of the river, swaying with the current, and then the mighty mass of the water and the smell of industrial work hovering in the air, oil and flour and dirt. Then we are in Chinatown (that one or two blocks with special street signs on bright red lamp posts and an arch – little else but the shockingly beautiful Chinese Garden to make it feel like a legitimate Chinatown). In a flash we are in Old Town – the grit and grime and soup kitchens and halfway houses. The wandering woman yelling at the no one in front of her. The man slumped against the wall of a vacant building with a paper bag propped next to him. The lines of people waiting for lunch or dinner to be served. The Sisters of the Road cafe serving hot meals for an unbelievably inexpensive token, the most rock n’ roll of low-cost food kitchens.

Then Davis and Couch and Burnside – to the corner with the once-strip-club-turned-amazing-cuban-restaurant-back-to-the-now-way-more-vibrantly-painted-cabaret-club, marking the arrival at Burnside and the crossing over to a whole new quadrant. Stopping to let people off at Burnside, I know we are leaving the section of town that most reminds me of San Francisco, that makes me remember the relief of Fall’s first rain in the Tenderloin, the smell of clean wet sidewalk overtaking the piss and shit and beer and vomit smell you hadn’t even realized you had almost gotten used to before those drops of rain started falling. This sensation, this memory, makes me fond of Old Town and Chinatown. There is nostalgia in the similarity – an affection for the realness of a city, for the broken and drunken and lost people of a city and a love for the folks who show up there, every day, to be there for their fellow humans. I love a dirty city almost as much as a green one – find comfort in a place that is conflicted, volatile, transitional.

Portland’s adult industry is like that for me. As a feminist (and one who has been called a feminazi), I have deep and visceral reactions to a lot of the pornography industry, feel it in a very personal way (no academic disconnect here). But as a liberal, as a progressive, as a liberated woman, I also embrace sex and the freedom to express it. I get, really get, the advantages to openness and shamelessness. You can not walk half a mile anywhere in town (well, maybe in the West Hills – but I don’t spend any time there) without passing by the heavy wood door of an adult video arcade, a swinger’s club, a lingerie “modeling” storefront or a strip club with $2.00 pabsts and a cheap buffet. It is the same live and let live mentality that makes life here so free that guarantees my right (and yours) to see some absolutely naked ladies at pretty much any hour you might have the desire and promises the opportunity to also order some ribs or a ribeye if you need to kill two birds with one purposefully placed stack of one dollar bills. Sure, Oregon has a lot of hippies – but we’ve got a lot of perverts, too (for good and bad), a real source of local pride for many.

Even the Willamette River, the north-flowing water working like spawning salmon to get to the Columbia River and then to the ocean, is a dirty little wench – her water tarnished with human waste every time we have a really intense or long rain, our aging sewage system overworked and lazy during truly wet spells. Locals know that the alluring look of the Willamette can be like a siren call to a ship-wrecked sailor. Swimmers: beware. Canoers: row steady. Fisherman: cut bait and pick up take out. Particularly on specific days (warnings are issued) you don’t want to get any of that water in your eyes or your mouth or in any open wound. And yet it is still the heart of the city – the scene we build parks around, the landmark we build esplanades along, where people bike and walk and dream and hold hands, where people boat and ski and dinner cruise – the essence of the city in a very primal way – Portland’s dirty, lovely, faithful and moody spirit.

Portland, as a whole, is a rippled out version of the Willamette. I love it despite and because of these contradictions. My true love is a bawdy, tree-hugging, hair-triggered, sometimes shit-filled part-time stripper who volunteers with Cascade Aids and The Blanchet House of Hospitality while growing her own vegetables and lobbying for more solar panels to power the lights for Darcelle’s nightly performance of old-school drag-queenery. Portland knows who she is and is not ashamed, but still tries, all the time, to fight the good fight, to argue with herself over what is right and what is wrong. She marches and petitions and then has a beer at Dante’s hoping to catch Storm Large with her top down. Her core is often rummy and tainted and, literally, rife with infection – but is more often surging and pushing and working to move against gravity.

I know I am no native – worse, I am a transplanted Californian. My love is no less real for that fact. And Portland may or may not know who I am, let alone love me back. Still, I wait at the dance for Portland to notice me, my back against the wall for the best view of the floor. In the high cuisine greasy spoon that is Portland, I sit at the bar and think of no one else. My mind may wander to other cities occasionally – I may fantasize about a San Francisco sojourn or a dreamy life lived in Old San Juan. I may, for the smallest of moments, wonder if I am in the right place. When I look down the curve of the dinged up bar, past the water stained wood and the recycling bins separating out the glass and plastic and paper, past the compost bucket for food waste, when I see Portland’s tangled hippie hair hiding her hussy eyes – I have no doubts. I sing along with the jukebox and say Hold me closer, Portland Dancer . . . count the hybrids on the highway . . . lay me down in sheets of organic cotton . . . you’ve had a busy day stripping for your pay.








*While not being gifted at photography, I have several close friends who have a talent for the lens.  This is the first in what I hope will be a series of collaborative posts using my words and the photos of these talented photogs. When I was writing about Portland, I immediately thought of Bettie’s photography and her eye for a place – for both its beauty and its realness.  I sent Bettie an early draft of this post and she ventured out to see what caught her eye. She, too, loves grimy Portland and her pictures are more than I could have hoped for – thank you, Bettie, for singing along.