Home Sweet Hillsdale

Despite the incident at the border crossing, the weekend get-away to Vancouver had been everything we'd hoped for. Nevertheless it was good to finally be back in Portland, even though I knew I'd miss those comfy beds at the Bayshore Westin (Red, who is a fan of Westin herself, informed me that one can purchase their entire bedding line).

But after crossed back over the Columbia on I-5 that evening (too late for Red's class obviously), we did not return to the room in the house in Laurelhurst that Red had been renting all summer. During my time in Fresno and Hawaii, she had decided that it was time to move on, and had found a new place across the river in SW Portland. We'd spent a brief time there after coming back from Hawaii before heading up to Vashon Island for Thanksgiving.

Her new apartment was in the wooded slopes of the Hillsdale neighborhood, in a section in which the streets are all named for states of the Union (all fifty of which I have now visited BTW). It's a lot closer to her school, and a much better commute for her.

The neighborhood was quite a change a place from the gridlike regularity of of the neighborhoods along East Burnside. The streets in this area of Portland have an impossible-to-understand layout that ranks up with Staten Island as being impenetrable to outsiders.

Moreover there is a distinct cultural change from Laurelhurst. I noticed this on the very first day back, when I walked the short distance down to the Starbucks in the Hillsdale Center along Capitol Highway. Instead of the slack-jawed homeless and overly tattooed street urchins of the "Burnbux" on 28th and Burnside, the place was filled was folks whose ages were at least twenty years older than mine.

As I sat typing by the glass window, a man next to me, well into his dotage, interrupted me with a creaky voice to ask what kind of computer I was using, since he was thinking about getting one.

I put aside my usual choleric what-the-fuck-are-you-interrupting-me-for nature for a second and patiently pointed to the big Apple logo on back of my Macbook Air. "It's an Apple," I told him. 

The choice beverage of corporate hippies

Then today we made our semi-weekly pilgrimage to the Burlingame Fred Meyer, which is only a few obscure blocks away, providing you know the secret route. It is the oldest Fred Meyer store in existence, long famous locally for its decrepitude, but is was recently remodeled and now has a bit of the feeling of a Whole Foods

The store was bustling with Sunday afternoon shoppers. I went off looking for the bottles Zico coconut water that I love so much, which I mix with my daily vitamins supplement powder (Yes, I know Zico is now owned by Coca-Cola. I'm glad as it will now be more widely available. Last year I couldn't find in convenience stores except in places like Malibu).

I had bought Zico at that Fred Meyer before, but that day I couldn't find them in the beverage aisles. As I was searching back through the same section, a man wearing a tie and nametag and carrying a clipboard came down the aisle inspecting the cartons of bottles.

"Excuse me," I said to him. "I was looking Zico coconut water. I know I've seen it here before."

"Yes," he said, "that's over in the hippie foods section." 

He'd said that with a perfectly straight tone, as if he expected I would know what that meant. I waited a beat, just looking at him with a blank expression as if to say "could you please talk to me like a normal human being?"

"...the natural foods section," he added, with a matter-of-fact tone, pointing towards the other end of the store.