Day 40, Sunday March 24: Portland, Oregon

Carnegie libraries visited: North Portland, St. John’s, Albina, all in Portland, Oregon.

The 8 a.m. “Dignitaries” AA meeting in Portland takes a novel format, in which crosstalk is allowed and indeed encouraged. In AA-speak, crosstalk is defined as “giving advice to others who have already shared, speaking directly to another person rather than to the group as a whole, and questioning or interrupting the person speaking at the time.” At this all-males meeting no one is allowed to respond to the comments directed at them, however, with the idea that this prohibition will force participants really to listen to the comment rather than to prepare a rebuttal to it. Participants are expected to commit themselves to attending every Sunday morning session, so when the group’s leader called out “Who’s missing today?” a couple of guys responded with comments like “Navarro, he had to work” or “Sam’s sick” and so forth. A speaker then shared his story for about 15 minutes before opening the meeting up to crosstalk.

An individual need not hit “rock bottom” before coming to AA, and those in AA typically reject the idea that there even is such a thing as a rock bottom. As I’ve heard it, “the elevator can always go one floor lower” or “every rock bottom has a trap door.” So members will share stories of their own personal bottoms, meaning the conditions they were experiencing at the point they decided that they had a problem that they needed to do something about. At this particular meeting, the humor revolved around who had the most “Portland” bottom, like “I was drinking vodka all day while binging on John Cusak movies and eating gluten free brownies.” Having a bottom is itself a very Portland thing, as in Molly Pennington’s essay “Ten Portland Stereotypes That Are Completely Accurate” lists stereotype 10 as “Portlandians Just Might All Be Alcoholics”.

Green Tortoise Hostel

At 10.30 I went to the lobby to join a walking tour. Our guide was Margo, who was not a Portland native, but who had lived there for more than a decade. My fellow tourists included Bart, Jorge, Teddy, and a woman who’s name I didn’t catch. She is Argentinian, but to my eyes looked German; she had come here to watch the Portland Thorns women’s professional soccer team play the New Jersey/New York Gothams. Jorge, an IT engineer, was originally from Venezuela but had been living in the states for a few years. He had come to visit his sister, but her apartment was too crowded so he was staying like me at the Green Tortoise hostel. 

Just up the street from Powell’s was McMenamins Crystal Hotel and Al’s Den, the attached pub. Margo was explaining something about the hotel being the oldest continually operating one in Portland when two gray-haired guys walking by corrected her: “No, it wasn’t. It was a gay bathhouse in the 70s and 80s.” Margo tried to defend her statement before saying something about Al’s Den which, again, brought a correction from the passersby. Margo was momentarily flummoxed before she gathered herself and moved our tour to the next location.

Margo’s tour was not really to my taste, but I’m going to defend her here. A few days earlier I had come across a tour going into one of the Carnegie libraries I was visiting. I heard the tour guide tell his group that Carnegie had made his fortune in the oil business and had later given his money to build around 500 libraries in the US. That’s incorrect. Carnegie’s vast fortune was based on steel (although yes he did also make money in oil), and 1689 of his libraries were built here. Unlike the guys walking by our Portland tour, I did not correct the guide. The moral question: is it more important to get the details right, even if this means correcting someone, or to ignore mistakes so that the story can continue to flow? Like most moral questions, the answer is that it depends: how important is the flow is and how important are the facts? When it comes to dinner conversations, my rule of thumb is that the flow is almost always more important. (One of my pet peeves is to hear this debate by long-partnered couples – “It was in 1974.” “No, it was 1973.” “No, 1974” when the specific year is of little importance to the story.) I’m going to say this principle holds true for city tours. It really doesn’t matter to me if that hotel was the longest continuously open one or not. It did matter to me that the tour guide was undercut, at no real benefit to the tour group. 

I met “Teddy” on the walking tour that morning. He is from France, and I’m guessing that Teddy is not his formal name but it is what I heard. Teddy looks like Adam Driver, only more charismatic and handsome. He is at least as tall (6’3”). As we walked by Powell Books – one of the most famous Portland landmarks, and reputedly the largest bookstore in America – Teddy said “Ugh. I went in there yesterday and checked out the philosophy section. I couldn’t find any books on Chinese philosophy so I asked a clerk. He said, ‘Well,  you should check out the spirituality section’. That drives me crazy.” Teddy is a Ph.D. student specializing in ancient (before the Common Era) Chinese philosophy which, he insists, is no more about spirituality than is Aristotle’s work. Later, I asked Teddy about the extent that modern Chinese philosophy is influenced by its ancient philosophy and, befitting a Ph.D. student, he replied that he could not really say because he was specializing in ancient, not modern, philosophy.

Late in the afternoon I joined a group of travelers around the big screen at the Green Tortoise to watch the Portland Thorns, one of the teams in the professional National Women’s Soccer League. It was fantastic. Even though most of us did not wake up that day as fans of the Thorns, we all became one while the game progressed. We groaned at missed opportunities and erupted gloriously at the team’s triumphs. I don’t now remember who won, and that doesn’t really matter. What does, for me, is that strangers came together in common purpose as long as the teams played.

Oh, yeah: I got my left ear pierced and added to my ink collection by getting a tattoo of “Library Lady.” Totally Portland.