I went back to Portland to see my childhood friend Loren for the night. Arrived early and left 24 hours later. We took our familiar walks and ended things where we started, at his local coffee shop, Keeper. In the space beneath the cafe they make men’s kilts on one side, all leather, and on the other side, mead. Portland…so exquisitely weird. It always gives me hope in spite of our crappy president the whole world could be this way.

We bookended our time with a coffee talking about future plans, would I return to Germany this winter? Had I ever been there when it snowed? And Loren told me the story of visiting his friend Jason in Berlin, the two of them former music partners in a number of San Francisco-based projects.

It snowed in Berlin that Christmas and Jason’s girlfriend had friends in Dresden, a wealthy Russian couple, so they went there for a party on New Year’s. DIY fireworks launched street level in downtown Dresden socked-in with snow, the look of it from the balcony with the bright colors reflecting off the snow. Loren with his mic taking field recordings of the church bells on Christmas Day, the way they cross-faded from one church to the next as he walked. Then the performance they did in a local bookstore in Kreuzberg, how Jason arranged a number of paper figures and tree branches along the perimeter, all of it candlelit, someone’s coat hung from a rack caught fire. I wanted to counter with a comparable story of snow in Germany but couldn’t; the best I had was driving through the Black Forest from Kolmar but that was more stressful than anything else, with no cell service or knowledge of road conditions and the snow only getting worse.

It’s a neighborhood coffee shop just a 10-minute walk from Loren’s and we always start and end things there.

Out front at one of the tables, trans people with exotic facial piercings and tatts up and down their fingers and fists, hands interlaced in a gesture of kin. All of our lives braided.

All I’m doing here is field recordings too.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, pacific northwest, Portland