Toasting the Winter of Fourteen With Purple Cocktails

"I miss East Portland," I said to Red.

We were standing in the dark on the dirty sidewalk in front of Por Que No?, a taqueria along Hawthorne Boulevard. Like many hip and trendy places to eat and drink in this quarter, there was a line out the door to get in and order at the counter.

Fortunately the frigid temperatures of the past week had receded. It felt almost balmy, even though we could see our breath clearly.

I did indeed miss East Portland. Just being there again reminded me of that. The west side is beautiful in its own way, but when you live on the East side, you are never more than a short drive away from dozens of interesting places to dine.

We'd certainly taken advantage of that fact over the summer, when Red lived in Laurelhurst. It was an easy option for dinner. Now getting to anything on the Eastside during the late rush hour was a huge pain in the ass. The river is a formidable barrier to traffic. Trying to cross the Ross Island Bridge at that hours requires the patience of getting out of Brooklyn into Manhattan.

The Hawthorne neighborhood in particularly is an epicenter of casual interesting Portland nightlife. Across the street a new Portuguese restaurant had opened up. Red mused about it, and the woman in line in front of us overheard her and jumped in to explain.

"My mother-in-law is from Portugal," she said. "The food isn't really Portuguese, but it's pretty good anyway."

Inside the decor of the restaurant is a heterogeneous collage of hip Mexican religious iconography---Virgen de Guadalupe portraits of various sizes crowd the walls. The place was packed, of course.

It was about a ten minute wait to get up to the counter to order our food. I got the standard Taco plate, which I'd gotten the last time we were there, last summer.

The Summer of '13, as I'd come to call it with affectionate memory.  "When are we going to go back to referring to years that way?" I like to ask people. When we finally do, then it will feel normal again, as if some kind of state of emergency has been called off.

Red's colleagues from her school were already there, and had seated themselves in the far back, at a tiny table. It was quite cozy getting the four of us in there. They had already arranged drinks for us by text message---a pair of pomegranate margaritas, served in large beer glasses. Both the food and the drink were worth the drive and the wait.

It was a convivial evening. It was nice to meet her colleagues, one of whom may be one of her recommenders for her residency next year. We had to call it an early evening, because he had to go home to cram in some continuing education credits via online courses by the end of the term. Such are the trials of keeping one's medical license.

As it happens, he was planning on going to Rio for the upcoming carnival. He invited both Red and me to join him there, and began pitching the idea to us. It's a longshot, but if I wind up in Brazil at the end of February, you'll know how the idea was hatched.