Still catching up, still in motion. I’ve started to write about Portland, but haven’t even gotten to the good part yet…
08)08(05 its 915pm
We are in Salt Lake City, UT, the second time I’ve knowingly been here. Its not all that tremendous, especially considering I am sitting outside of a closed Pizza Hut in the confines of a crowded airport waiting gate. C6, Delta Airlines. Departs in over an hour.
This week marked the accumulation of many things, most importantly the marriages of two of my best and most trusted friends. I saw their lives reach this important stage of completion and commitment that I’ve yet to witness from any of my peers, and I watched them do it confident that it was completely right and fine.
We flew out from JFK airport in New York City at about 6:30 on Friday morning, the 30th. We woke at 4am and made some half decent coffee, grabbed our pile of possessions from the corner of Sarah and Richel’s living room, otherwise known as home for the previous week, and headed out into the pre dawn Brooklyn air, strangely quiet and nearly peaceful. Our cab driver silently and passively raced through the empty streets while truckloads of produce and livestock unloaded, stragglers roamed the projects, and inexplicably, a crew of about 10 guys played basketball outside the window of the jet black cab. We got to the airport in due time, but spent ten minutes trying to find change for our cab driver, who insisted that he didn’t have change for the $40 I handed him to cover the insane enough $30 cab fare. I scraped change from my pockets. $27. Good enough. The airport was packed. Here it was 5:15am and for no rational reason the check in area for Delta is crammed with groggy confused New Yorkers, which is not a terribly pleasant scene to be in the middle of. Everything felt like we were being punished for being bad school children, rush this way, rush that way, get on the plane dammit we’ve got to get the right runway time, no time for coffee, no time to chat, just sit down and shut up and enjoy your flight.
A woman from Kentucky chatted with me for the duration of the 3 hour flight. Her husband hauls cargo to the Mississippi, she teaches junior college. Her town lies between four rivers. Life is interesting, they have a house in southern France, where they summer for a month or so. Everyone is courteous as I explain “Yes, I’m a musician, no, I don’t know what that means.”
Stopover in Atlanta, five minutes to run across the airport. Groggy flight, nothing to really, pay attention to, you know.
Portland. The hills are green, the interstates even are quaint, and the air is dry and hot. It already feels familiar, newbie hippies camped out on the airport floor with guitars and piles of luggage all around. Sportswear wearing yuppies nurture their kids into Volkswagon station wagons. Once again I’m in the airport in Portland, and yet this time there is Kate there with me, and we’re free to do what we want to do. We don’t even have to head home, because there is no home to go to.
We packed all our stuff clumsily on our backs and climbed onto the MAX train headed into downtown, skimming past the highway exits I used to turn onto to make it home, those mornings after having coffee at Kate’s downtown apartment. The advertisements, still the same, the glittery dry air. It seemed like such a tiny city compared to NY, and it was. Everything was quaint, and manageable, everything one could desire in a city that way, even traffic felt innocent enough.
We climbed off the train in the middle of downtown and straight into a million memories. Over to Stumptown, the downtown coffee shop where I’d played a couple of shows and where we’d meet friends or just end up so many times that the baristas recognized me even then, a year and a half later. I recognized faces, and it was OK, it didn’t feellike they were stuck, it felt like they had grown, experienced things, enjoyed Portland and its easy going lifestyle, and it was good.