The reason I’m not sure of some of the things I write is because I get behind. We’ve moved on, and I’m looking back. And my hindsight is no better than my memory, which isn’t what it used to be, and probably never was.

So here we are in Tacoma, or actually, not even. It’s Lakewood, Thornwood Castle where the wedding is taking place tomorrow, now today, and I’m looking back at Portland with intervening events which are coming so thick and fast it’s like a whirlwind and I could lose my balance and certainly mix things up and not be sure of what and where and when I was.

Enough with the explanations which sound like a pre-emptive strike in case I get it wrong.

We went to breakfast, late, or lunch early, at My Vice in the Hawthorne District, which we had passed by several times and Kristina said, “We’re going there. It looks good.”

Of course the food was good, yummy, and the people, waitress, as friendly as we were getting used to wherever we went. The place was a local hang-out destination watering hole with a particular bent which was toward a certain generation I myself have lived through, relatively unscathed since I seem never to have belonged to any particular generation even when it was going on around me. Hence the posters on the walls. And the look of people coming in to match the staff, a kind of verification of belonging, “Yeah, you too, me too.”

It was partly the clothes and the way they dressed. Partly the hair, variously arranged in colors. And tattoos, lots of tattoos, available right across the street. And piercings, apparently multiply everywhere, some not immediately visible. These were participants in a generation they didn’t want to let go of. I was there too during those earlier times, but never had the chance to fit in and belong, you know, my familial poverty and my proclivity for opera, but I sat in My Vice and tried to relive what I hadn’t lived in the first place. I was, as almost always, enjoying myself in the present, and, as I said, the people were friendly and the food was good.

Kristina said, “We’re going to see more of Portland.” So we went to China Town, which turned out to be a kind of Dragon Gate, a street we didn’t go down, and an enclosed block-long enclave behind a wall, some parts of which you could look through to see an inner courtyard with a little pool, and a locked gate where you pay to get in, and a sign that promised food and a gift shop.

Kristina said, “It’s looking sadder than I remember. Let’s keep going.”

We took a few more steps and were in the lower side of the Pearl District. That was even sadder. Graffiti, lots of homeless people strewed around. We kept going, moved along.

A few more blocks, things were picking up, and towers.

I tried to joke, miming Western gun fight, “Reach for the sky!”

The towers looked down and replied, “We’re towers. That’s what we do.”

We got back to the parts of the city that looked and felt like city, lots to see, places to go, stores and restaurants and theaters and happy people. We loved the Portland bridges and went over them. Of course I thought of Venice, bridges over water. Of course I felt right at home, as I always try to do.

We were in a throbbing city with mostly very good parts, getting ready for the highlight. It was going to be dinner with friends. Kristina had a really close friend she hadn’t seen in years. I have friends like that too, so I know what it’s like.

We were meeting at a restaurant none of us had been to but somebody said was good. Cuban food. It was called Cubo. You stand in line to order, go sit down with a number, and eventually they bring food to your number.

We had claimed a table. Our dinner mates arrived, introduced, shook hands and hugs, and I stayed to guard the table and everyone else got in line to decide what they wanted. I didn’t have to fight anyone for the table because everyone who came in after us could see I spread out and prior claimed it.

Kristina had said, “What would you like?”

I said, “Something good.”

So I sat guarding the table and watched a waiter coming down with steaming bowls to match the waiting numbers on other hungry tables. So I got to see what everybody was eating, and I was ready.

Our group came down from ordering, with the number they placed conspicuously on the table, and we got to know each other as we caught up and waited for the food.

Kristina’s friend was rather stellar, almost exalted, but down-to-earth in the way people are who think like you do when you care. The friend was with the man who when they had found each other and realized, and were now together and I decided again, with the renewed joy I had lived my own life with for more than sixty years, sixty years married, the miracle of happiness when people get it right.

I enjoyed just watching them, she with the comfortable delight that at a still young age she could enlarge her life, he, with established credentials of his own, looked lovingly at her, and I identified. That’s the way I was with Shirley. That’s the way Chaz is with Kristina.

I was awash in hope for the world, and then the food came. Steaming bowls for everyone, and they took the number away.

I always like food, especially when it’s good. This food was lots of Cuban, hot but not too, and plantains of course, on the side. I remembered the Cuban restaurant in Pasadena, Isla del Caribe, around the corner on Walnut Street. We loved it, ate there several times and discovered Cuban island food, and of course, plantains. We made it a go-to place for us, and were saddened when it closed. We didn’t know why it closed, but we knew our lives had diminished.

That’s just the way things are, life. You win some, you lose some. You hope for replacements. Like Burnett’s Ribs in Altadena. You try to find, but so far no one has ever.

So the evening in Portland was a renewable joy, because you don’t, one doesn’t, I don’t often enough find people friends who think so much alike and say so far everything right. It’s like a miracle.

I only wish. And, to preserve my good mood, I suppress what might be a realization that, because of geography and vicissitude, I might never see them again.

But I am able to re-align my mind, and sustain the consoling thought that they’ll be there at least in memory, dependably almost present, and probably long after me when by then it won’t matter, there’s still a chance.

And, of course, the restaurant. My usual rather silly statement to the waiter or cashier, “Someone said I could come back,” and the expected response, nearly always verbatim, “Anytime.”

The same could be said of Portland.