We left our home in the City Beautiful yesterday morning a little after 8. Vance gave Chester his we're-going-away-for-a-while-but-I-hope-this-will-help treat just before the doorbell rang and Dana walked in. He was visibly conflicted - the only time I've ever seen sheer panic in the eyes of a dog over so silly a choice.
Do I bark at this intruder? Do I jump up and say hi to Miss Dana, who has fed me and walked me countless times? Do I chew the delicious treat in my mouth? Do I run upstairs? Yes, I'll run upstairs to ponder this further… And chewing is overrated, swallowing whole is much more efficient. I'll do that. But first I'll snarl at mom as she attempts to steal my tasty treasure… (I was really just trying to say goodbye; oh the joys of parenthood.)
It was heartbreaking leaving the 28 pound "monk" but we were late as it was and the lovely Dana was ready to go. I finally hugged her, said "good morning," and let myself relax a little after running back in the house to say goodbye to Chester once more, sans angst.
We stopped at the curbside baggage checkin to avoid the long lines inside and I regretted it about two minutes into the man's five minute rendition of How To Construct The Dexter's Chicken Salad spiel. I should have known when he started the "where have I seen you before" act that it would end with the four word plea that he repeated over and over: I'm providing a service. Although I hate mandatory gratuity I forked over $5 so that we could get to our gate and officially be on our way to the Rose City.
Southwest Air has perfected their boarding process now so that instead of a veritable human cattle call that looks something like the line outside Best Buy the night before a video game console hits the shelves, you stand with a group of five determined by what time the previous day you remembered to check in online. Add that to the singing stewardesses and you have something really special.
On the last leg of our flight, from Kansas City to PDX, I sat down next to a soft, pale woman with stark white hair. The second I sat down, she kindly winked at me and said, "You know, we play our cards right nobody will sit next to us." Vance followed shortly behind and broke her sweet heart, and I moved to the seat she'd hoped would stay empty, trying my best to be completely invisible so she would be comfortable for the hours that followed. She mostly alternated between a new age paperback book and dreams, nodding off every ten minutes or so for a quick nap. Must have been a good book.
Ten hours and five delicious chapters of Anne Lamott's Blue Shoe later, we arrived at our gate in Portland. From there we still had at least an hour of public transit to ride before we could unlock the door to the vacation rental we hoped wouldn't be in the back alley of a strip club somewhere. (Spoiler alert: it isn't.)
As the red line took us quietly over the highway filled with rush hour traffic, we could see the majestic Mount Hood and a bit of Portland's lush landscape through the windows. Vance commented on how green it all was, as the window before us was engulfed in huge trees that have been there since long before the highways or trains were constructed.
There were four women sitting to our right, each coming from a different city and converging on Portland like a church bus unloading on Sunday morning. The voice of the only one not wearing a wedding ring provided an hour of background noise for our journey. She described her former husband, who suffered from anger management problems in the past, as "a humble man," to which her friends turned to her aghast as if she had commended Mussolini on his good manners. He was in therapy now, she said, physical therapy for a form of MS that was rapidly taking over his body.
The other women commented on the weather, and the public transit, and the adventure the "four old ladies" (their words) would have in this city.
The train slowly filled to the brim with cyclists and wandering homeless men, two dogs and two men with identical wedding rings discussing philosophy in the corner. Everyone who didn't have a suitcase seemed to be reading a book. Public transit seems to create the time and space for reading like no other daily event. I considered whether I might start taking the Lynx back home, and decided against it when the image of the man waiting at the stop on 436 every morning, punching the sky, flashed in my mind.
Our condo was more than what we had expected. Rather than being adjacent to a brothel or crack house, it's two blocks from a grocery store and a block from the streetcar line, close to art galleries, restaurants, and coffee shops. It's a studio with a modest living room, modern kitchen, and clawfoot tub in the bathroom. As soon as I stepped in I had this urge to unpack everything all at once, to move in. Once the clothes were hung and the laptop connected to the protected WiFi network, I felt my shoulders relax and my heart rate slow.
We're here.
In this place.
But we were also hungry in this place. The night begged for celebration, so I suggested a place that was described as a neighborhood gem with some of the best food in Portland, a place that would have had lines out the door if more people knew about it: 23Hoyt.
We arrived to find a restaurant in the middle of a neighborhood shopping district. From our table we watched dozens of people on bikes, people dressed more for comfort than for fashion forwardness, people carrying boxes of pizza or ice cream wrapped in housemade cones, people sipping local beer at the pub across the street, people calmly taking in the cool Wednesday evening air as they walked with their dogs and their lovers toward the homes nearby.
The menu at 23Hoyt offered some creative takes on ordinary dishes -- butter lettuce salad with ruby red grapefruit, avocado and chili oil, chilled asparagus salad with hard cooked egg and arugula, penne with sausage, arugula and chilies, scallops with mushrooms and brown butter sauce… Our waiter poked his head out several times to update us on the chef's progress, his worried posture letting on that the seared scallops were proving to be a challenge. But when the food finally landed on our table, the scallops cut like butter left out for ten minutes, and tasted better than any I've ever enjoyed at a fine restaurant. The food was beautifully but simply presented, and the restaurant comped dessert for us because of the wait, which I would hardly have noticed if not for the waiter's genuine concern. After seven layers of chocolate and Vance's roasted pound cake with sorbet, our bodies gravitated toward our downtown condo.
It's here in this place that we unwind, here that we take pictures and smell roses and drink way too many lattes. Keep an eye on this blog for updates on the mundane and exciting details of our first "braincation."
