Dead Letter Department #31

(did you miss dead letter department #30? read about Chuckanut Drive & artisanal chocolates here!)

I was gendered correctly buying luggage for my trip, & it felt like a good omen. The duffel bags of my early twenties, battered & smelling faintly of mildew, have all been lost to the sands of time & it felt somehow ridiculous to heave an enormous hard sided suitcase to the car for a few days in Portland, so I went shopping. Plain duffels are hard to come by these days—everything had too many wheels or charging ports or both, but I finally found an enormous army green bag with satisfyingly zippered pockets.

There’s a point on I-5 where I actually realize I’m going somewhere, not just tooling around, usually just as I come down out of the hills into the fields of Skagit & see the wide expanse of fields rolling away on both sides of the highway. I’d made an appropriately ridiculous playlist, & alternated singing in a new register & cackling at Michael Hobbes & Audrey Gordon’s Maintenance Phase. My friend has a theory that everyone has an episode of Maintenance Phase that will hurt their feelings, & the Michael Pollan one made me do some pretty serious thinking about farmer’s markets & the idea of trying to get a special opt-out card for yourself while leaving everyone else behind in our broken food systems.

The thing about constantly walking in your little Westworld robot rut, as my sibling so viscerally identified, is you never encounter strangers, never get the brief, bright encounter. This trip was full of them—the Uber driver whose little red cocker spaniel rode trustingly on my knees, the three college kids who had put on fancy clothes & taken themselves to Fumerie Parfumerie to buy a graduation present. I asked one of them what she’d chosen but I didn’t quite catch the name, & I’m sorry now, because I’d like to smell what someone picked for themselves to go out into the world with.

The best stranger, though, was a guy with a shopping cart full of his belongings & a calm black dog who came racing up outside Cargo while my friends were inside shopping (it turns out they were touching every single kimono in the store, & I cannot quarrel with the resulting purchases, which were perfect). There was a little cluster of us all stranded on our side while the train wound through the warehouse district, stopping and starting with an enormous clatter. “Do you see my phone? Is it on the tracks?” the guy kept asking, and eventually I got down flat on the pavement to look under the train with him, warm asphalt pressing against my chest while I squinted past the undercarriage.

“I see it! It’s not underneath the train, or in a puddle, I don’t think it’s going to get hurt if you wait until—“ I started to say, but one of the other people waiting was already climbing up and over the stopped cars. He returned with the phone, apparently unharmed, and we all let out a little cheer as the phone’s owner collected it and started back on his way, raising both arms high in a triumphant wave as he disappeared around the corner.

We went to Lone Fir cemetery, & stood between the four redwoods a former gold rush miner had planted around his grave. The marker is snapped off, nothing but a jagged base, but his trees remain, all of them stretching upward together. I brushed the moss off of small marble hands & tried to remember what the different symbols meant: a hand extended in comfort, a lamb, a laurel. I’d like to go back again sometime when a landscaping crew isn’t working—I’d like to go back when the memorials for the asylum patients & Chinese immigrants in Block 14 have been built.

Everything we ate was insanely good: pork larb with sharp lime & savory shallots, perfect tiny air-light pancakes with a smear of black caviar, honey lattes. My former hatred of Brussels sprouts dissolved under careful preparation, & every cocktail was a potion.

It was the longest amount of time I’ve taken off in years, & the first time I’d seen my friend since before the pandemic first started. He was the last one I saw before it started, too, the final burst before it all happened. I tried not to think about work too much—pretty unsuccessfully, it’s always running in the background in some capacity or another, but it was probably healthy to make the attempt, to sit out on the porch listening to the bird chatter & not be deliberately timing when I should get up and come back to my desk. I left my laptop at home so I couldn’t get into my projects even if I suddenly wanted to, & it was good to stay up late talking to a new friend, to listen to someone else’s music & fall out of my strict rhythm for a while.

The sign on my bedroom door at the house my friends were renting said it was the Ghost Room, but the ghost must have been a gentle one, the kind that helps you fall asleep in a strange bed & gives you gentle dreams that dissolve completely when you open your eyes.

one good thing

The week was full of them, but this window stays with me: there was a weirdly soothing red light from the neighbor’s window across the street at all hours, like having a small friendly star hanging just outside. The house was built in 1883, & you could feel it in certain places, all the happenings glimpsed through the glass over the decades. I think when no one’s staying there that our good ghost probably lingers right here, watching the world through the scrim of lace.

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