Why I love Portland, Part I

...or perhaps, why I love the West Coast, the first in what will no doubt be a series of short & quick observations.

I went to my Al-Anon meeting yesterday and, while the room was full and most of us sat around in folding chairs or on the sofa, one guy sat on the floor for the whole hour in the Lotus position. A chick came in a bit later and promptly kicked off her shoes and hoisted her ass into the Plow, audibly popping numerous formerly-compressed vertebrae in the process.



And none of us skipped a beat, involved as we were in sharing our respective Experience, Strength & Hope. I loved it.

Recovery, West Coast style.

Ice, Ice Baby

So there I stood at the counter at Macy's in Lloyd Center, a pair of "Cuddle Duds" wicking long underwear bottoms in my hand.

I must digress a brief moment to share that this quest for long underwear (long johns, base layer, whatever) has been ridiculously difficult and drawn-out, probably because, at least to a certain extent, I've made it so myself, and I didn't need to.

I have come across other long underwear in the last week or so, but simply haven't liked them; I don't care for waffle-weave, I DO appreciate wicking, I don't want black, and I obviously need them to fit.

And while I value my warmth, comfort, and ability to be "wicked" of sweat, I don't really want to have to take out a sizable loan to achieve this state of outdoorsy coziness. Decent long underwear isn't cheap; it's ridiculous.

But, so: I found what I needed, and was paying for them at the counter when the formerly youthful and very skinny, frost-haired saleswoman who rang me up noticed that my driver's license still said Minnesota, and suddenly disclosed that she was from St. Paul (the "other" twin of the Twin Cities). It was enough, it seemed, to bond us as Sisters of the Far North; she chatted me up and tried to get me to open a Macy's account (apparently, I already have one, according to all three of my incredibly impressive, filled-with-green and zero negative ratings credit reports that I checked when I got home).

However, just moments before I proffered my license, she'd been doing the Tilda-Swinton-as-Ice-Queen-in-"Narnia"-routine when I initially accidentally pulled out NOT my debit card and driver's license simultaneously, but TWO debit cards instead (just a spacey moment on my part). I slapped my forehead and gave her my proper I.D.



But the license changed everything, and she went from pinched to pleasant (though artificially so) in less than 60 seconds.

As has been my ongoing issue with Minnesota, I experienced her new-found jocularity to be painfully superficial, at best; she had previously been ready to write me off completely, to draw & quarter me for my innocent oversight. But then, deciding I was somewhat tolerable because I'd spent some time in her former neck of the woods, she immediately backed off and offered me complimentary pink (in honor of breast cancer awareness) Frango mints and bottled water, and when the transaction was finished and I gathered my things to leave, she waved me off with a chirpy "We Minnesota girls have to stick together!"

I thought, no we sure DON'T. I'm not there anymore, I'm not and never was a Minnesotan, and I didn't just leave 'cause the weather dips to -40.

"Minnesota Nice" is not a concept I created, nor is it something I fabricated; it absolutely exists, and I experienced it in numerous ways, shapes and forms for six years. I found the instant changes in warmth and receptiveness, grim-to-grinning-in-60-seconds totally confusing and difficult to deal with among the natives. And I got a little wee taste of "home" again today when this saleswoman just about had a fit because I'd initially offered the wrong combination of plastic to pay for my purchases and then did a complete 180 in front of my eyes.

I think I must've looked utterly dumbfounded by her sudden garrulousness. What could I possibly say?

I find Lutefisk utterly repulsive and a total, complete culinary joke.

Man! Frozen lakes scare me! Guess it's this irrational fear of falling through!

So, why do you "Minnesota Girls" fry your cheese curds, anyway?


I just said nothing, grabbed a few more pink mints and beat a hasty retreat.

There are two things I'm pretty sure of: if you're older than 20, you're not a "girl."

And it's not just the winter in Minnesota that can be icy.

The Novelty Aspect

So, there are items--food items, specifically--I am coming across at the Fred Meyer stores here (a PNW chain the locals like to refer to as "Freddie's") that I fondly remember from past years spent in either Olympia, Washington as an undergraduate or Portland, Oregon as a post-grad.

I am referring specifically to Tim's Cascade-Style Potato Chips.

I am not on my cycle, nor am I particularly craving salt and/or fat. I was in Freddie's today, doing a little banking, and when one's bank is situated handily within a grocery store, one usually always finds something AT said store to pick up for a future meal or two (various items are suddenly "remembered" or "needed").


As I did, both "remembering" and "needing" (for no real reason other than sentimentality) the potato chips.

And since it occurred to me that I had not yet bought nor consumed the "Welcome Back to Portland" bag of Tim's Cascade, I decided it was high time.

Even though they are a good 2 bucks MORE than the leading national brand and even though it didn't occur to me to read the ingredient list, which includes MSG, a somewhat headache-inducing no-no if consumed in certain vast-ish quantities.
So I try to avoid this flavor-enhancer whenever possible, but sometimes, I simply space it, as I did today, blinded as I was by an impromptu trip down memory lane.

So I bought a bag and threw it in the cabinet and I'm not sure when I'll rip it open and consume a few chips, but there it is. My bag of Tim's.

Guess I'm back. As if I couldn't already tell.

Yum.

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-Jig

So, it has happened. The Big Move is now a thing of the past, or of past tense: I have moved. All those months (since January '07) of nervous expended energy planning, mulling, organizing, finalizing...the moment came and went, as moments do, and I survived it, all of it, all the myriad details. Although I had never done this before, I knew that many, many average citizens such as myself had rented trucks of all sizes and hauled their crap uneventfully from one end of this great continent to the other. No big deal.

I quite my job on Friday, 9/21/07, and spent the next week cleaning my apartment from top to bottom. A week later, the following Friday, I was a noodle and living in an empty (though really clean) space, which felt weird and sort of generic. The landlord was coming to do a walk-through and about 45 minutes beforehand, I'd run into the building's caretaker in the hall. He became all sentimental about my time as his (and his girlfriend's) neighbor and heaped upon me many kindnesses, which caused me to burst into tears that would last through not only Friday's walk-through (I'm sure the landlord thought I'd come completely undone, but true Midwesterner that he is, he totally kept his cool and seemed completely unfazed by my histrionics) but Saturday's pack-up. I was a veritable waterworks; I'm amazed I have any salt left in my body.



I left Minneapolis early on the afternoon of Saturday, 9/29/07, after picking up the 16-foot Penske truck at 9:00 that morning, loading it with the help of a few good friends (5, to be exact) who came not only bearing strong backs, biceps and quads, but lattes in to-go trays, a thermos of coffee, and all sorts of bakery goods to quell mid-moving hunger pangs.

I was too nervous and sad, really, to eat anything myself, although I did finally inhale a croissant once we were on the road. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Everything was loaded according to plan; B. carried out the vacuum and when I protested, saying I'd meant to do one final sucking-up of bits of detritus, she replied, "You know, at some point you just gotta say 'I'm done.'" So I decided I was done.
The cat was put in her carrier after being forcibly extracted from her spot in the dark, dank nether-reaches of my under-sink cabinet where she'd fearfully wedged herself, and after my final teary curbside goodbyes, which included kissing the neighbor's fuzzy-headed black cat and hugging my helpers, Friend, Cat and Self were off on a moving adventure that included a quick pit-stop at the corner hardware store for a padlock to keep my possessions safe in the truck.

I have to say, I profoundly hate goodbyes. They never feel like enough; there's this small, final window of shared time to say whatever you need to say for closure--for now, as it's understood, because plans are always made to write/call/visit, futons and extra rooms are offered for crashing, yet still--you can't possibly fill that tiny, final moment with all the meaningful, relevant thoughts bouncing around your head and your heart.

I want to say, take care of your cancer, I don't want you to die, or your presence has been such a comfort here, and I appreciate your friendship, or, simply, thank you for accepting me, but I can't; it's just too full a moment, too loaded and too poignant and really, actually, very hard, so I hope, in my face and my tears and the few words I do manage to squeak out, that the person I am having closure with understands fully just how I feel and how difficult the letting go is.

And I had a lot of those moments leading up to the Big Day, weeks of them, in fact, with friends, co-workers, neighbors, my entire 12-step group, even my hairdresser, culminating Friday, 10/5/07, when I put my intrepid roadtripping friend B. on a Minneapolis-bound plane after we'd shared months of planning, traversed 6 states & 1700 miles, crashed in 3 motel rooms, downed an assortment of road food (I will never eat beef jerky again), snapped digital pix of much whizzing western United States scenery, listened to a wide variety of tunes on her iPod, spent two days in downtown Portland, and downed a few steaming cups of Stumptown coffee.



That was the very final goodbye, the final, teeny, absolute last connection to a now-finished piece of my life that was at once nurturing, fun, hard, lonely, responsible, enlightening, challenging, deeply painful at times, important, relevant, full of personal revelations and good growth, and very, very, very cold.

I could not have returned to my roots had I not gone and lived there first and experienced all of that. Things happened that helped me become the person I desperately needed to become, and I have come back here better, and different, and calmer, and more adult, and more me. That's how this journey needed to unfold. I know this now.

And so I'm back here, finally, in Portland, a new roommate to my old friend D., our respective cats, the tabby & the tuxedo having finally made an uneasy peace, my room all set up with my familiar bed and duvet and the cat's hammock and my night table and basket to hold my assorted reading materials, almost exactly as it used to be, the small framed Winter lake scene oil painting my boss gave me as a going-away present hanging on the hallway wall, a reminder (minus the chill) of what I will be missing in January, and February. And March. And so on.

More significantly, I feel like I've resumed a relationship with that lost 20% of myself that I'd been missing for 6 years in the Midwest, where, as I explained to others, I was really only living 80% of my life. I couldn't be truly who I needed to be there; I was in the minority, sort of, in terms of my values, and my food choices, and my outlook on life in general, my pop cultural proclivities and my outspokenness about various things political, or gender- or animal-related, whatever.

When the VP of our group at the big corporation at which I worked heard I was returning here, his reply was, "She seems like she belongs on the West Coast." I'm not sure it was entirely a compliment, although his observation was nonetheless correct.

I've come back to my home soil--that is, the west coast, since I was raised in Berkeley--and to that formerly lost 20%, which seems to have been waiting for me here right along. I fit in effortlessly here. I'm not stared at. No one says, "That's different," when they're not sure how to disagree. I don't feel ignored, either; I just feel....typical.



And I like that, very much.

So I learned I could survive the slight, repetitive ripping of numerous goodbyes and big transitions and months of planning and driving a 16-foot truck through unfamiliar states when I hadn't driven a car for 6 years, that all of it was just something else I could undertake and follow through on successfully, and now I can move on to my life's next thing.

'Cause, as I've also learned, there's always a next thing.