Nancy Rommelmann

Love This Photo - The Diplomats

Yo yo yo

 

Ode to a Greek Diner

An article of mine I thought was lost to time, Ode to a Greek Diner, about an old-school Greek diner on its last legs. It's closed now, and the decor is spectacular, wow; perfect for someone wanting to re-fab a diner and do it right.

Is Portland the New Neverland?

My article, for the Sunday Oregonian Opinion section, is online now.

The opening:

A recent episode of the AMC series "Mad Men" showed its female characters navigating a husband's departure for Vietnam and the land mines awaiting career women in 1964.

"I realized, watching it, these women were all 26," says Paige Prather, who moved to Portland in August and who is also 26 years old. Unlike her TV sisterhood, Prather, who has a bachelor's degree in anthropology, has not picked a profession. Unmarried, living rent-free in her sister's attic, she is looking for part-time work in customer service, or a full-time position in the arts. Graduate school also looms as a possibility. The crazy-making multiplicity of her situation is not lost on her.

"I sometimes think we're the scatterbrained generation," says Prather. "You have so many choices, and you know what you end up doing? Nothing. You become the DJ-fashion-designing-knitting-coffee-maker."

It was an interesting piece to report, and I am fortunate to have profiled six people about their experience of making it (or not) as 20-somethings in Portland, a city with the "tantalizing insinuation, much heralded in the media, that young people here make their passions their professions, in coffee and beer, music and bikes, progressive politics and as stewards of the land."

Let me know what you think, and/or join two of the people I profiled -- Matt Davis and Kate Williams -- and me this Monday at noon Pacific Time, for a webchat at OregonLive. 

Season of Sharing

 
This is Harper Bates, his wife Amie and one-year old daughter, Nari. Two years ago at this time, Harper, Din and I had recently celebrated the opening of Ristretto Roasters Williams, which Harper, an architect with Holst, designed. The entire process had been a blast, Harper coming up with concepts and then having us into the offices, where we would talk and tweak and where Harper, a ball of energy, would say things like, "Fantastic idea. I'm going incorporate that and we'll have another meeting when I get back." Back from one of his many hiking trips, including a gargantuanly long one, I don't remember where, only that Din and I were like, three weeks hiking and camping out? Better you than me, buddy.

It was following this hike that Harper took a tumble down a flight of stairs, he would later tell us, and that he figured, it was just exhaustion. He went to the doctor and, a week before his daughter was born, was told: not exhaustion, ALS. He was 37 years old.

I am crying as I type this because, it makes no sense. There's no reason, there's no fairness. When I was younger, it did not occur to me that these sorts of things would happen to anyone we know, because we were all made of Kyptonite. But we are not.

Harper and Amie are one of the families profiled in the 2010 Season of Sharing. If you can, donate, won't you? It's easy and it's the right thing to do.

 

Vicodin and Poop

So let's say you have the foot surgery on Monday. Though you've heard there's a lot of pain afterward, it turns out to be a not very big deal; you don't even feel it at first, and you think, for the millionth time, how you are a lot tougher than most people, how most people are wusses, and do you take the Vicodin once you get home from the hospital? No you do not; you do not need it! Your foot really feels fine...

Until about 8 PM, when there is what might be described as a niggling pain, really not much, so you take one Vicodin, and you fall asleep, with your foot propped up on two pillows so that sleeping is a little awkward, but heck, you sleep.

Until midnight, when you wake up to pain, what might be described as a really terrible pain, and you squint at the Vicodin bottle by the light of your cellphone, because you do not want to turn on the bedside lamp and wake up your husband, and you see you can take a pill every four hours, so it's time. But a whole pill? No, you do not want to do that. So you take half, and are awake again at one, when you take the other half, and at two-thirty, when you take a whole one, because you are in agony, and you think, for the millionth time, how dense you are, to not have realized the local anesthetic had not worn off when you were casting the rest of the human race on the unter-mensch pile.

At six, you're up, and things are terrible. You're whiting out, you're covered in cold sweat, your foot is throbbing and you really have to pee, and maybe barf. You wake up your husband and ask if he can bring you some bread, because the Vicodin is making you nauseous, and he helps you to the bathroom  and then goes downstairs and brings you up a slice of bread, which you try to eat while sitting on the toilet, but your hands seem to have turned into bird claws, so you wind up making confetti of the bread and getting what you can in your mouth and then chewing while shallow-breathing; you think you might faint. You get back in bed and take another Vicodin.

During the next 24 hours, you sleep, waking only to take more Vicodin, which makes your face buzz and your brain thick and your lips chap and, maybe, causes the skin on the roof of your mouth to shred. Who cares. You sleep 16 of the next 24 hours, and when you wake up on Wednesday, you feel human, the pain has lessened; you can now alternate the Vicodin with Advil, and you have a really good day, until later in the day, when it occurs to you that you haven't gone to the bathroom since... hmm, since when? But it's not a big deal; it's not as though you're going anywhere, you're not even allowed out of bed, so you don't worry too much about it.

Until Thursday, when it's not so much a worry as an issue. Things that should be happening, are not. This is noticeable. Very noticeable. And so, in an effort to make things happen, you drink a lot of coffee, which, on top of the Vicodin and the Dramamine you have been taking for the nausea and to sleep (and which are chewable and orange and tiny and so you have probably taken one or three more than is absolutely necessary) makes you feel as though you're a electric sign on the fritz. You don't know if one eye is opening and closing spasmodically but it feels that way; you might in fact describe the way you feel as Scratchy on The Simpsons, just after Itchy electrocutes him.

Which is just about the time you get a call from one of your best friends, who wants to visit. You love this friend, and he's been out of town for months. You and he loll on your bed, where he tells you stories of his travels, hilarious stories, wonderful stories about food and women and wine, and you're lying there smiling and nodding, while inside you are thinking, when in god's name am I going to poop? And that the only feeling you can compare this to is when you were having a baby, except this time, the baby wants to be born out of your butt.

Thursday afternoon passes, slowly. You lie in bed trying to figure out what is going on. Do you have a waystation inside of you, a gathering point of which you've heretofore been unaware? A point that can fit something the size and density of a bowling ball? 

Since there is no one with the possible exception of your mother who wants to hear about this issue, you call your husband and in your sweetest, lightest tone say, "Honey, darling, love of my life, on your way home from work could you pick me up some, um, laxative?" He chuckles, and says sure, and comes home with something called Women's Laxative, in a little pink box. You take two pills, and a third, for the heck of it, but no more Vicodin, no.

The next morning,the birds sing, and things that should have previously moved along, move along. And over the next few days, when friends call and email to ask, "How's the foot?" you say, fine, fine, all good, you haven't even taken any Vicodin since Thursday, which is good because of the, well, the side effects. Which is when every single friend says, oh my god, you mean the... And you say, yes, that, and why didn't anyone say anything?

So you do.

Books, Books, Books in Review

Where the Crooked River Rises, by Ellen Waterston, from Sunday's Oregonian

The reviewing has become a regular and well-loved gig. Here are a few more:

Evening's Empire, by Zachary Lazar

The Rajneesh Chronicles, by Win McCormack

Day Out of Days, by Sam Shepard

Backing Into Forward, by Jules Feiffer

How to Become a Scandal, by Laura Kipnis

Cheerful Money, by Tad Friend

Live Through This, by Debra Gwartney

The Atomic Bazaar, William Langewiesche

Five Cool Things

Sunday morning, one of the best times of the week. Have my coffee, the New York Times... but lately, before either of these, I find myself scrolling through Five Cool Things, put together each week by Richard Pelletier at Lucid Content, which lands in my email around 7. Reading what Richard has gathered each week is like sitting at the breakfast table with a friend, a friend who doesn't care if your hair is rumpled and you're still in your jammies, who with humor and enthusiasm has to tell you about the cool art and architecture and music and letterpresss and food he's found this week, and created links to, so that even before eight o'clock in the morning, you are checking out photos of Mamikia the Superhero and listening to Donny Hathaway sing A Song for You, and thinking  about what this song means, in relation to everyone's life as well as your own, and especially in regard to your husband, who has just brought you coffee in bed because your foot is in a cast, but you're cruising the world anyway.

You can get Five Cool Things, too xx

Ow

Had the foot surgery yesterday morning. Until last night at about 8, I wondered what the fuss was about, the rumored tough recovery, the pain qua pain.

The the local wore off. Long night, breaking Vicodin in half in the dark, then taking the whole thing, wondering when I could take the next one, whether I was going to barf from no food/too many pills...

"Baby," I said, waking Din up at 6, asking him to please get me a piece of bread, maybe a soda, and help me to the loo, I thought I might be sick.

Poor Din. No one wants to see their loved ones whiting out and in pain.

He got me the bread, which I ate while sitting on the toilet. "Ate" is a euphamism; I scrabbled at it and shoved the pieces in my mouth. I don't recall ever eating while sitting on on the toilet\; I found it really quite odd, though when I mentioned as much to Tafv, she said, "Really?"

Took more Vicodin. Also, a Tylenol 3. Slept for two hours. Did some work. Washed. More Vicodin. Feel human.

Alone Forever, Together: Minh Tran and Portland Nightlife

Wonder what Portland's pretty, [p]arty people do late at night? Fashion/nightlife photographer and filmmaker (and good friend of my daughter's) Minh Tran shows us, in his latest series. Tavie well represented, including in this shot, doing one of her very favorite things. I once scrolled through the several hundred text messages we've exchanged, and 70% of them involved Tavie saying "yum!" about something.

Poor Foot

So about two months ago, my left foot, on the bunion area, got all hot and bothered. It puffed. It reddened. I thought I had gout.

"You don't have gout," my doctor said, that she thought it was my bunion. A bunion that I had surgically taken care of at fourteen, but for dancing in a puddle of beer and sogging out the bottom of the cast so that, in the morning, my best friend slammed my leg against the side of her porcelain bathtub until it cracked and we took it off.

"Where's your cast?" my mother asked, when I got home. I don't rememberr her giving me a hard time about taking it off two weeks early, which was the reason I always thought the foot didn't exactly, well, look as pulchritudinous as it might.

"That's not it," the foot surgeon told me last month, and showed me how, rather than fix the bunion, they shaved off the bump. Note that there are about 100 different ways to fix a bunion, and that shaving is not usually the best option. While my foot calmed down considerably after a week, the surgeon explained the reason for the pain is one of the nerves; it's inflamed and, in fact, feels like a little caterpillar under there.

This coming Monday, I am going to get it re-fixed. Not a big deal -- I will be awake, if dopey -- but apparently a somewhat painful recovering, including a week (a week!) in bed, during which I get to review two books, and watch the entire series of "The Wire" on DVD. What a great opportunity to see it again. I will not even be able to go downstairs, and have invited several friends to lunch: they bring the food, they clean up.

Steve Dublanica, "Keep the Change" - Ristretto Reading Series, Nov. 11 at 7 PM

Several years ago, I received an email from a friend: he had a friend, Steve Dublanica, well-known as the Waiter Rant guy, embarking on a new book on tipping. Steve would travel the country, watching and working with people in different industries that traditionally include tips, taxi drivers in New York, croupiers in Atlantic City and such. He also wanted to work at a Northwest coffee shop, and how did I feel about him hanging out at Ristretto Roasters? I felt fine.

Steve came, he worked, we adored him. I told him, when the book comes out, we’d throw him a party. While Steve reads from Keep the Change: A Clueless Tipper’s Quest to Become the Guru of Gratuity, at Powell’s on the 10th, you can also come hear him read at Ristretto Williams (3808 N. Williams Ave.) on the 11th, at 7 PM. Perhaps he will read the chapter he wrote about us, in which he says such kind things, I blushed. Might we pour a little wine after the reading? Yes.

This event is free and open to everyone, as are all Ristretto Reading Series events... you are a fan, right? Not yet? Come on in!

Coming December 8: Win McCormack and The Rajneesh Chronicles: The True Story of the Cult that Unleashed the First Act of Bioterrorism on U.S. Soil