Scenes From Seattle
“It must be coming up through the sewer vents,” my mom says. Every third breath walking down the street in Seattle is pot infused but we have yet to see anyone smoking. We do see a man playing bongos on some free newspaper holders who is both higher and lower than I have ever been.
My mom heads into the conference hall and I head uptown to take a drop-in dance class at a studio a friend recommended to me. The instructor teaches the same combo for 3–4 weeks, adding choreography with every class, and this was week two of a ridiculously dense hip hop routine. I stand in the back with two other first timers, each of us with a fight-or-flight level of panic in our eyes. I lock eyes with the woman next to me and we decide together to fight for this combo.
Two hours later, with a hard won mastery of a whopping 45 seconds of choreo, we walk out together, grinning. A man on the street says something indecipherable to us and we look at each other and decide together not to be offended. This is the last good decision I make today.
You see, I’m usually a tea drinker but Seattle is the coffee capital of America or something so I stop by a coffee shop on my way back downtown that multiple Top Ten lists for Seattle coffee site as “low key” and “non-pretentious.”
The first thing I see when I walk in is a man wearing a white dress shirt with professorial, tweed elbow patches sewn on. For some inexplicable reason I don’t run screaming from the shop. Instead I walk up to the counter where two wavy haired baristas are arguing about punk music behind the Slow Bar- a coffee bar for people who have nothing better to do than leisurely sip their hand poured, individually brewed, coffee concoctions for two hours. So…me.
Barista A: “Speaking of punk, do you know Nina Hagen?”
Barista B: “99 Lyftbaloons?”
Barista A: “No, that’s Nena. Nina is an opera singer. She has an incredible voice but she’s totally destroyed it.”
Barista B: “Actually, Nena is classically trained, too. Most of the German punk scene is foundationally based on opera.”
Yup. Super low key. Not pretentious at all. I order some coffee that one of the other baristas recommends and settle in at the slow bar with a book and a carafe of whatever I ordered that I’ve already forgotten the name of. I’ve been listening on and off to Baristas A & B and I’m on the brink of packing up when Barista B says, with a flip of his naturally wavy hair, that coffee consumption really took off after the enlightenment. I sense that this is a trap. I know I should I walk away. But before I can stop myself I’m correcting him, because I’m pretty sure coffee drinking fueled the enlightenment and I’m pretty sure a professional barista should know this, and because I’m apparently just as bad as they are when it comes to spouting out things I know for no good reason. Barista A touches his hand to his heart. “Oh my god,” he says. “Where have you been all my life?”
They insist on sharing with me the reserve coffees they’re sampling from a secret vault in the basement of the shop. (A low key, non-pretentious secret vault, I’m sure). They keep talking and pouring and talking and pouring. One of the coffee makers looks like something from a Louis Pasteur experiment.
Barista B: “Most people would say I’m a music snob. I mean, I have a do degree in it.”
Barista A: “Are you familiar with Gig Allen? I don’t like them but Americans do.” (Just to be clear, there is no way this man is not American).
Barista B: “When I go to Ethiopia it’s like, actually crowded.”
And my personal favorite, Barista A: “Coffee and cheese really suffered during WWII.”
My options are clear: A) Punch Barista A in the mouth, or B) Get the hell out. I book it for the door and make my way to a safe haven, Elliot Bay Bookstore, for a ritual cleansing by literature. (pun intended).
Maybe it’s the caffeine, maybe it’s the layout of the store, but I am unexpectedly hit with the realization that I’ll never get another book from my Dad ever again. Re-realization, really, not that that makes it any less gut wrenching. I self-soothe by wandering the stacks for an hour and, remembering my non-buyers remorse in Portland, I buy a book of poetry. There are eyes floating in the air and the river won’t stop exploding. I was seven years old when I came to Seattle with my mom, dad, and brother. Mostly I remember the jellyfish in the aquarium. To this day, I’ve never seen anything as well lit as that jellyfish tank. The jellyfish appeared to be lit from within. That’s love, I think now, in the bookstore checkout line. If I glow it is because I am well lit by an outside source.
Between the caffeine and the onslaught of feelings I’m still a little shaky as I walk back downtown. A man is pushing a stroller full of books down the street, his own imaginary next generation. I try to shake it off but I’m already shaking.
I head for the CNU Conference lost and found to reclaim my phone, which I left at a lecture earlier today. “Can you prove it’s yours?” a man asked me jovially at the lost and found. “Definitely,” I say, holding up my mom’s phone, which is calling mine.” I laugh, he laughs. How many times have I had this exchange in my life?
I peer into a conference room to see if my mom is there. I want to give her her phone back but no one turns around when I enter, so I leave. Maybe it’s the caffeine talking but I know my mom, she would have turned around. I know it.
I think back to the night before when a man on his cell phone at a restaurant where my mom and I were have having dinner said the following things in quick succession:
“Keenan’s a fucking freak. I mean, do we want someone who’s gunna compete for the job in Minnesota?”
“I’d take the smallest one. Take her to the back room and fuck her.”
“I mean, if you have a good alibi for blowing someone’s head off, use it.”
“I didn’t think the job was going to be like this,” our waiter tells us.
Unable to find my mom and eager to explore the city without having to talk to anyone who lives here, I head toward the public library, a bastion of silence, which is supposed to be an architectural marvel. I walk up a street with cherry blossoms swirling to the ground, dozens of them getting caught in my curls. I’d take a picture but my phone’s storage is full.
I think of my cool friends and my warm friends and the alchemical reactions between them.
I think of my friends who are presenting their thesis shows this weekend. I swore last year, at mine, that I would be there for them. I am not. I am walking uphill to a library and actively avoiding reading a series of texts I just got that may or may not make me more anxious upon reading them than I am not reading them.
I clear space on my phone.
I think my over caffeinated heart is going to sprint screaming from my chest and spew reserve coffee all over this flower lined street. I also think that if someone gave me a mountain I’d name every vista with a point. Point Made, Point Taken, Point Less, Point of Fact, Point of Order, Point Ilism, Point Ed, Point Er, Good Point, For the Winning Point, What’s the Point, No Point, Get to the Point. Maybe I should run a marathon. Or a triathalon? Or a quadrathatron!! Is that a thing? I’m sitting on a bench outside of the public library googling “coffee overdose.” A ladybug crawls toward me. If there are two things I mistrust in this world it’s coffee and ladybugs. I wave the white flag and move to a new bench.
“Some things aren’t worth fighting over,” I tell my mom, regarding the ladybug incident. “Good luck falling asleep tonight,” she says, her lips turning up at the ends. We’re sipping the complementary wine set out in the hotel lobby every day from 4–6pm. I’m hoping it will counteract the caffeine.
It does not. This is where “when in Rome” gets you when Rome is the coffee capital of America and your coffee tolerance amounts to, on average, one cup of coffee every six months. It’s been a weird day in a wired city or maybe a wired day in a weird city, and I can’t quite tell if I’ve had an “authentic” Seattle experience or if I care either way. I’m comforted by the fact that tomorrow I’ll be at Olympic National Park. No coffee, no cell phones, no problems. I finally drift off around 5am to visions of jellyfish and German opera singers.
