November 6-12 - Portland IV -- The Secret and the Sylvia Beach

Returning to Portland from Seattle the first time, I was now staying with Tammy, my sister's good friend from college and a professor. 

The first night, I had dinner with my friend Chris from college (whose mother I would later stay with in Detroit).  When Chris and his cousin Kimmy picked me up, they had organic bread that wasn’t just certified but had a near-artistic provenance, with a list of grain fields and grower references.  Chris made soup topped off with pesto blended in the near original Cuisinart deaccessioned by his grandmother.  Chris is a delight, one of those people who takes endless interest and extends golf-umbrella-sized enthusiasm with the architectural support of real knowledge.  I learned a thing or two about old bridges and the history of home building in Portland.  

Kimmy, who works and is the mother of young children, turned out to be a near-professional cyclist in town for a race.

Me to Kimmy: Do you race a lot?

Kimmy, in low-key tone: Not that much . . . Every Saturday and Sunday.  I’m just in town for a race.

Chris good-naturedly to Kimmy: Now, I think you’re underselling it a little.  It’s the world championship.

I was in and out of Portland, to-ing and fro-ing from Seattle, but I I did get to see the city on foot, 

And to visit the beautiful farmers' market with Tammy the next day, passing this park on the way there.

We got  caught in an absurdly constant rainstorm.  As ever, if you want to run into people you haven't seen since college, roll out of bed groggy, throw on sweatpants and no make up, and sit under a bus shelter in a rainstorm.  

Here is Matt Abrams from Williams, with Owen (I think!) at the farmers' market.

That night, Tammy's colleague and friends came over for a dinner themed to add comedy to tragedy, or at least levity to farce: Tammy's colleague teaches a positive psychology class and one of her students had come up afterwards, handed her a DVD, and said, "From some of the things you say in class, I thought you could really use this."  It was The Secret -- the age old Law of Attraction that took on a modern form as this book, and at least one Oprah spot.  The book is about "manifesting" what you want, and is the most literally illustrated program I have ever seen.  (The proverbial elephant in the corner shat, and someone was sweeping up dung, in this guy's living room.)  I slept through most of it.


If there was a part of the tour that was elating, it was Seattle part 1, followed by Bellingham, followed by Seattle again.  And if there was a part that was an unmitigated bust, it was Seattle, redux, special trip from Portland.  


I made a special trip to see the Microsoft Art Collection, on kind introduction from a woman who had attended my first reading in Seattle.  Having driven three and a half hours there, the woman from Microsoft's art collection cancelled on five minutes notice, with one of those litanies of excuses in whch three excuses is far worse than one.  It reinforced my earlier opinion that she was flaky to an extreme accepted in the art world and nowhere else in professional life.  Adding insult to injury, I got a speeding ticket on the way back to Portland. 

As silver lining, I got to have lunch with A.J. Brush, a college classmate who works in a Microsoft research division.  

After having seen a world class corporate art collection—with all the vibrancy and creativity that entails—at SEI Investments outside of Philadelphia, I was underwhelmed by that at Microsoft.  (You can imagine I am biased by the cancellation or that there was more than I got to see.)  As A.J. and I agreed, the art was mostly there in her building to help you identify which floor you’d gotten off the elevator on.  The top floor—the executive suite—essentially had no art.  The internal marketing posters were far bigger and more bracing that the art itself.  I liked some of the works individually, or certainly didn’t mind them.  A.J. mentioned a work that had been removed – ‘the up the nose’ picture. 

I took a self-guided tour of the art in the public areas of the convention center and did have the privilege of seeing a section of the Berlin Wall, on the anniversary of its fall.

Rather than being impressed by the creativity of the traditional art, I was impressed by the R&D spaces of the research offices.  In one room, there was a shelf in the corner with three spheres on it, each sphere a couple of feet in diameter.  Two were glass orbs used, James-Bond style, as massive touch screens.  The third was a gray Pilates exercise ball, a sure sign you are in a real, used, research space.

The other sign you are in a real research space is that you say to A.J. you are going to nip into the ladies on the way out and make your goodbyes beforehand, when she casually reminds you that she has to see you physically out of the building, as in, you are in a lockdown environment, however friendly that security is in presentation.

A.J.'s building was a “Where the Boys Are” interlude, such was the feeling of seeing posses of men traipse through the atrium while I waited in reception.  The inverse of the museum workforce.

As a side note, the relative city analysis by mood of law enforcement continued: never have I been pulled over my a nicer, more handsome motorcycle cop.  That didn’t make it any less traumatic.

From there, I headed to Sylvia Beach Hotel on the coast, carefully pegging to the speed limit, winding through small towns and arriving at the Inn five minutes before the 7pm communal dinner. This meant I got the one seat left at the table, with the red napkin, and had to go first in the ritual game of “two truths and a lie.”  


The Sylvia Beach is a special place where all the rooms are decorated after famous writers, and there is a third-floor library open to everyone.  I stayed in a Gertrude Stein room I managed not to photograph.  The Sylvia Beach website has wonderful drawings of all of the rooms.

I had a personal best in Scrabble in the kitchen off of the library (breaking a 300 score for the first time – though with curious rules that you could use a dictionary but it was of 1960s era and only words in it counted).  

After Scrabble I unwittingly got to chatting with the owner, Goody Cable, who is fascinating, a Life As Art person. She essentially started the place so she could have conversations with interesting people and she just returned from driving around the US seeing people she knows because they were repeat guests over years.  

She was in the middle of a project of compiling one story per country to tell her grandchildren who are roughly seven so they will know and remember each country.  As Goody put it, "I'd like them to know more than Sarah Palin by the time they are eight."

Sample, for India: a woman had her baby on a blanket outside under a tree and walked away for minute and the baby was gone. She realized a monkey had picked it up and taken it to the very top of a tree. Immediately the woman's neighbors each grabbed a corner of the blanket and held it out as they shouted to the monkey to bring the baby down. The monkey tossed the baby and they caught it.

Sample for Brazil: A nice male friend of Goody's was traveling with his less nice female friend.  They stayed in a beautiful treehouse style inn rigged across the top of the tree canopy.  You would eat in the middle and then walk out the spoke to your individual home.  The woman couldn't figure out why they made so much food at dinner and was told it was so that she could take some back to the monkeys near her treehouse.  She ignored them and didn't do it -- "I'm not going to take food to a bunch of monkeys."  The monkeys beat her up.  

It's an "oral tradition" project. Goody doesn't plan to write them down or blog.  Trying to think of a story to tell her made me realize I mostly track observations of people, and made me aware of story and plot.

I spent much time walking on breathtakingly picturesque beaches, 

also getting caught in a torrential downpour / sleet storm at the farthest point out and back. 

The next town over has fantastic fish at a place called Local Seafood, near this beautiful bridge

and a place where seals (I think) lounge on the docks in semi-darkness, a deafening chorus of seal jibberish, lolling like giant rolly pollies.

As local color, am I the only person who thinks this is an odd, maybe even racist, thing to sell?

(the Obama Chia Pet)

Near the Sylvia Beach was a cool local wine shop

Up the coast, a coffee shack, in a long line of coffee huts in the Pacific Northwest:

(Killer Coffee, as in the whale)

I toured the coast, seeing this lighthouse,

and a curious Stop sign embedded into the road.

The Oregon coast was the furthest point west.  I drove back to Portland through wine country

by way of McMinnville, 

a tiny town with a bookstore from which I checked out the remaining Harry Potters, and headed back to the city.  


At the airport, I traded in my rental car for a four-wheel-drive, spent an hour shifting bags from one vehicle to the next, comically accidentally got into another man's car, chatted in the line with IP lawyers who were on a boondoggle trip about the Bilski case before the Supreme Court.  Then I went home and posted a blog for the first time.  The next morning, I turned the car east for the first time, to head back to New York.


Postscript on The Secret: Portland has a great guidebook called Eat. Shop Portland., with volumes for other cities.  The posting in that book for Little T, An American Bar, said something to the effect of, "I focused on having an amazing bakery and coffee shop move to my neighborhood, and then Little T, An Anerican Bar manifested."  If anything elevates The Secret, this coffee shop is it.  

The eastward drive started with smoked salmon on absurdly good homemade spelt bread, and what, now pointed in the direction of Boston, I will call a wicked good latte.