A coffee odyssey, a bus story, Doonesbury
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It snowed overnight and stuck to the trees, in Portland, in late March.
Snow, silence, reflection: I look inward to examine my thoughts and prejudices and actions. I look outward to see and love others as mself, all of us fully human in our faults yet divine in our potential for caritas and aletheia—for grace and truth.
It is time, now, to be righteous with myself and forgiving of others. As I am righteous with others and forgiving of myself.
Forgiveness and love—two great gifts of spirit.
Sunday drinker
~An old story~
In 2002, I was collecting vignettes about riding the bus. This was written in September. Earlier in the year, I had downsized from a three-bedroom house to a one-bedroom apartment, and I had been introduced by my daughter Lyza to Robert Jaffe, the man I would marry in 2004.
I just missed the bus to work today, Sunday. They run a bit less often—every 20 mins instead of 12. As I am crossing the parking lot near my apartment, I see someone is at the stop. Maybe if he takes long enough to board, I’ll be able to make it.
But the man, sitting with his bicycle, waves the bus on.
I walk up. Take the other seat on the bench. He doesn’t put out his cigarette, but he does move his beer, paper bag and all. And, as I pull out my cell phone to call in and say I will be late, he starts talking.
He was supposed to go to work today, he says, but his boss had problems, so instead, he decided to spend Sunday afternoon drinking beer. He wasn't inebriated, just relaxed.
He says he works in landscaping. He is very down on clients who let the grass grow into their flower beds. “By the time you get to it, those roots are 5 feet deep,” he complains.
He goes on to list some other landscaping sins: people who actually, on purpose, plant useless and annoying things like Oregon grape and ivy—hardy plants that are the very devil to eradicate once they take hold.
A young woman walks by wearing clogs that have flames painted on them. “Are you a people-watcher?” the man asks me. “I am. See, she has those interesting shoes.”
I’m only listening with one ear, the cell phone not being very cooperative, but he doesn’t mind. I make a neutral interjection when it seems called for. But I am not drawn to this man as I am to others. He eventually gets around to saying he’s a single man and there aren't enough women out there.
“Well, I'm taken,” I say, and am amazed to find out that for once this chestnut of a line is true.
“Even taken women are sometimes interested,” he wheedles.
He gets up and wheels the bike around. It has a plastic milk crate lashed to the rear, bulky with plastic bags. I don't think he’s homeless, though.
“Look out you don’t drink and bike,” I admonish.
“Oh,” he says, “I just have a little ways to go.” And he pushes off. Just then, the bus pulls up. It came sooner than I expected.
I’m not much in the people-watching mood on the bus. The man in front of me, perhaps in his 50s, may be an adult with autism. He’s constantly stimulating himself, often rubbing his hand over his head and along the back of his neck, shifting and fiddling. It bothers me, the same way I don’t like to watch men stroke their mustaches. Why, I don’t know.
Coffee Coffee Coffee
I’ve had some issue with Starbucks. The chain is big and corporate, even though its longtime chief, Howard Schultz, is famous for treating employees as people and providing benefits even for part-timers.
Sometime big is good. Starbucks is singlehandedly responsible for awakening Americans, and later the world, to the delights of dark-roasted Arabica coffee and espresso drinks.
But I got to coffee nirvana without Starbucks.
In the early 1970s, I and my then-husband, Mark Gardner, lived just two blocks from the original Peet’s Coffee in Berkeley, California (Peet’s and Starbucks had an on-again, off-again relationship in their earlier years).
This was a time when everybody brought coffee in three-pound cans from the supermarket, already ground. Big names were MJB, Folgers, and Hills Brothers. The brewing machine of choice was the percolator, which came in stovetop or electric countertop models.
The Mr. Coffee-type brew-and-hold machine had just been invented but wasn’t widely available.
Mark and I fell in love with Peet’s, with the open displays of coffee beans atop rustic barrels, from which you could pluck out a bean and crunch it between your teeth. We’d walk around the store sampling beans, carrying our ceramic cups of black coffee—no cream or sugar offered.
Peet’s was on Vine Street. Around the corner, on Shattuck Avenue, Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse was newly open. We never ate there; we couldn’t afford it.
Tender thermoses
Impecunious as we were, Mark and I found some money for a small electric coffee grinder. Every morning, we would grind some coffee, brew it up in a stately Chemex glass pot, and pour it into a couple of small thermoses to carry with us to class.
This was before hot bottles had stainless steel interiors. These thermoses were lined with glass. Periodically, we would drop one or knock one into something, and the result would be a flask of broken glass and milky coffee.
Not a lot of places served cappuccino, my favorite. I remember the 3 C’s (coffee, crepes . . . and I forget the third C) and Le Bateau Ivre, still open after 50 years, a temple to croissants and cappuccino.
No, we have no Arabica
Mark and I took our coffee obsession to Medford, Ore., where we lived for about 18 months with no hope of finding coffee beans or a place to buy espresso. So when we moved to Portland in December 1974, we looked eagerly for better coffee.
I guess it never occurred to us to order beans by mail. This was before you could just look up a vendor on the Internet.
Beans from Boyd’s
At that time supermarkets did not even offer beans that you could grind in the store, which had been common before the 1960s. We drove to faraway Gresham to buy whole beans from the only place we could find, the Boyd’s coffee plant. Those were probably robusta (not Arabica) beans, and the resulting coffee was not very good.
Finally an espresso machine appeared at the Union Avenue Social Club, but the fine dining was still too expensive for young folks with a baby and a mortgage.
One by one, little coffee shops began to open, usually with plastic chairs, little ambience—but espresso drinks. I wasn’t really paying attention, what with the second baby, The Oregonian job and a pending divorce.
Suddenly, it seemed, there was Starbucks, with its cozy interiors and consistent vibe. Of course one opened near The Oregonian building on Southwest Broadway, ruining business for the little shop on Sixth and Columbia run by a Russian gentleman.
When I was doing freelance editing, I had a string—a trap line—of coffee shops all over town. A cappuccino, a pastry and a couple of hours of editing. It felt good.
Usually, I was the only customer drinking out of a ceramic cup. Even patrons who downed their coffee in the store drank out of paper cups. I still don’t understand that.
Aprés-café walk
After coffee, I’d walk in the neighborhood with my walker. For years, my radius, what my leaden legs and sore right arm could handle, was eight blocks. Portland is platted with 20 blocks per mile, which I thought was more than the average. I am indebted to the website uponarriving.com for pointing out that the average of U.S. cities is 20.3 blocks per mile.
In some cities, though, a block can seem like a slog. In New York, there are only 9 blocks per mile on streets that run east-west, although north-south streets have 31 blocks to the mile.
I often drove and parked in an unfamiliar neighborhood, wrangled the walker out of the car and made my laborious way around a couple of blocks, noticing everything—the houses, the gardens, the stone walls, trees, cats, pavement. For years I had sempervivum (a succulent also known as houseleek or hen and chicks) reproducing itself in my patio pots, thanks to a sample I pulled off a wall on one of those walks.
The Trimet Lift bus often takes me far from the route home to drop off other passengers. I love the adventure, as I seldom know where we are going. I could ask the driver, but as I say, I like the adventure.
Once in a while, when we pass one of the areas where I have walked, the memories are so fresh and warm. People say that Portland is falling apart, but there are many things about it that I still love.
My Sinatra moment
The recent brouhaha over newspapers canceling the comic strip Dilbert because its creator, Scott Adams, made some racist comments, reminded me of something I had totally forgotten.
I was the instigator of a similar situation in 1985, when I walked into the office of the editor of The Oregonian’s editorial page and told him that I thought we shouldn’t run the next week’s installment of Doonesbury. In those days Doonesbury ran on the op-ed pages because we considered it to be commentary, not the funnies.
There were two opinion pages each day, a result of the 1982 merger of The Oregonian and The Oregon Journal. I was the op-ed page editor.
The subject of Doonesbury that week was Frank Sinatra, and the comic strip basically said that he was connected with the Mafia. That may have been the case, but it hadn’t been proved and I thought it was libelous.
Anyway, the editorial page editor, Robert Landauer, agreed with me and we didn’t run Doonesbury that week. We did not cancel the strip.
“I just had a lot of objections to it on fairness and accuracy,” the AP quoted Landauer as saying. “One particular point was libelous. I just decided that’s not the way we want to make our living.”
Several big newspapers followed suit, including the LA Times and the Dallas Times Herald, but I think we were the first to raise the issue. Other newspapers, like the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer, deleted some of the strip. For instance, one episode included a photograph of Sinatra with Aniello Dellacroce, described by Trudeau as an “alleged human” charged “with the murder of Gambino family member Charley Calise.” Thing is, Dellacroce was acquitted after a mistrial.
There was another, more recent, incident in which The Oregonian declined to run a week of Doonesbury, something to do with abortion. But that wasn’t on my watch.
Kimchi
I love the Korean condiment kimchi, but it’s expensive. I found a recipe online that I tweaked while referencing The Art of Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz.* Kimchi is mostly napa cabbage, with daikon radish, garlic and other vegetables that you can mix and match. Katz says kale is not a team player, but I always add radish greens. And I like julienned carrots, too.
The essential ingredient is the flaky Korean hot pepper known as gochugaru. There is no substitute. I found it online at yummy bazaar. You could buy it at Amazon, but why?
I eat my kimchi nearly every day, and on the days I don’t, I eat my sauerkraut. Like sauerkraut, kimchi is good for your gut, and tasty, too. Top it with a tiny glug of toasted sesame oil.
The recipe calls for salted shrimp, which I don’t exactly keep on hand. I haven’t been able to get to an Asian market, although now with my new power chair I might do it. I substitute 2-3 tablespoons of fish sauce.
*Katz’s fermentation book is an incredible store of knowledge about fermenting everything from alcoholic beverages to meats, milk, vegetables, grains, beans, fish, seeds. He makes it sound easy, because it is easy. It’s enormously satisfying to make something complex and full of umami from just a few simple ingredients. Who knew you could make mead with just honey and water?
Living sinister
~Everything is backwards in my new home~
The new apartment is the same layout and square footage as the old one, but it’s a mirror image. So everything is opposite. The espresso machine is to the right of the kitchen, not the left. The bathroom counter is wide where it used to be narrow.
It’s harder than I would have thought. I have to reach for the utensils drawer with my left hand now. The glasses live in the wrong cupboard. The fridge opens the other way. The toilet lever should be on the wall side, but it’s not. I’m always reaching back for it and encountering empty air.
The night chorus
I thought the squeakiness I heard while visiting my new place was the compressor in the fridge, but eventually I figured out it was frogs.
My apartment is directly above a water feature, and it’s frog mating season. Fortunately, they switch off suddenly at 10:30, as if there’s a froggy alarm clock.
Check out
You may remember that the theme for March was reconnecting. The original idea was to bring back relationships that we had allowed to go fallow. Pick up the phone or send an email.
I have to admit that I didn’t do that. I let my definition of reconnection slide into remembering forgotten tropes and memories. Like today’s Doonesbury article.
But as for reconnecting with people, I failed utterly. I have excuses. I am consumed with writing and with moving, with missing my violin and letting books pile up unread. But the phone is silent and the email unwritten.
Some longtime friends have reappeared as subscribers to Becoming. I’m grateful for you and hope you will keep reading.
So, time to take a big breath . . . sigh . . . and move on to April’s resolution. Which is
Reset and reorganize
Not just external clutter, but disorganized thoughts and intentions, even dreams.
Now, these are things I can grasp and shake till all the little screws come loose.
What in your life needs a reset? The next issue of Becoming is due on April 1, but I don’t want to fool around with this.
—30—