Saturday I got up early to drive to tiny little Welches, Oregon to see my friend Andrea play and to hang out with my recording friend Jim.  (He and I produced Andrea’s CD.)  Since she’s living in Europe now, we’ll take any chances we can get to hang out with her.  Jim and I talked over breakfast, and she arrived while we were finishing up.  Huge hugs all around.

She played her set and sounded awesome.  There were a few songs that were new to me.  One in particular (which I don’t remember the name of, but I do remember that it was in E minor!) was especially stellar.  At the end of her set, I stood up and clapped, and then motioned with my arms for everyone else to stand up and join me, and we all gave her a nice, big ovation.  It was a great way to welcome her home and send her off again, all at the same time.

Tonight she and I got together for dinner at Queen of Sheba, one of the better Ethiopian restaurants in town.  Portland is known for, among other things, being a very ‘white’ town (to put it kindly), but for some reason we have a plethora of Ethiopian restaurants here.  In fact, another new one just opened up recently, and it’s not even very far from where I live.  Must. . .investigate. . .

After we were done with dinner, she asked if we could drive down to EliteHippieCollege.  She had just finished reading a book called ‘Blue Like Jazz’, the author of which had gone to that college, and had written movingly about a park with a little bridge.  She wanted to find it.  I said, “Let’s go.”

We drove all over and found nothing until we went around to the back side of the campus, and sure enough, we came to a large, forested area, replete with two bridges.  We parked the car and walked across one of them, and found a slightly overgrown path to walk down along the pond at the bottom of the ravine.  We ended up here:

The picture quality isn’t the greatest because it was starting to get dark, which meant that my poor little camera was trying to compensate, and it was hard for me to hold it still while the shutter was open.  (Have I mentioned how much I want a better camera?  And a tripod?)  But the place was beautiful, the conversation was great, and the mosquitoes weren’t too bloodthirsty.

It really started to get dark quickly, so we headed back up the forested path.  We stopped under the bridge to take more pictures, and here’s the best one:

It was just. . .an excellent evening.  I don’t want to trivialize it any further by reducing it to mere language.

OneYearAgo