Today Dani called to say that she is visiting Exeter, which reminds her of Evergreen except populated entirely by Paris Hilton clones.
Now that is a mental image!
She will be in the UK long enough I can almost certainly arrange a visit, even if I have to take trains to exotic destinations like Brighton. Hurray!
The phone call kicked off an afternoon remembering things like the night lots of Chorus members congregated at the Jockey Club (grubby dive bar in North Portland later demolished) to play Truth or Dare, and Byron made out with a taxidermied moose, someone stripped, and the smoking hot ambiguously gendered bartender kept throwing down shots, then danced on our table.
When the bar closed we staggered a few blocks to the house where Ana Helena lived and she cooked a feast of corn tortillas with cheese and salsa verde over an open flame.
I don’t think Dani was around that particular night, but now she lives in Italy – the closest person in geographic terms offering a connection with those times, except when Ana Helena intermittently shows up in Barcelona.
There are dozens of additional NW friends I would dearly love to spend more time with, but only a small number have remained in the old haunts. I was not the first to hit the road. One of the significant features of my homesickness is the knowledge that even if I went back to the same exact place, it would not be the same experience.
My kid laments his displacement in extravagant, exquisite language. I listen and offer comfort but it always seems that, while he truly misses the place, what he is grieving is not the loss of a community or homeland but rather, the end of his infancy.
I completely agree.
Portland, 2000:
