Summer's End

Summer's end, and so much undocumented. Astoria in July was, as always, like returning home. We spotted the maintenance man from the Hotel Elliott in the Desdemona Club playing video poker with his girlfriend. We saw, from a distance, the guy we talked to three years ago who had stumbled upon the town as we did, as so many people do, and never left. I sat and read Salinger's Nine Stories at Street 14 Coffee and looked up occasionally to watch the man we called our friend working on his laptop, not remembering who we were, wearing the same tweed blazer.

Our favorite bartender from the Voodoo Room told us she was moving to Seattle and it was her last week, and I can't describe what it meant for us to get there in time to see her and say goodbye. On my birthday, we went to Mary Todd's Workers Bar for breakfast. I ordered an egg sandwich with ham and Robert drank a beer with breakfast for the first time since he was twenty-something in Arizona. The bartender was a bear of a man named Bjorn, and he was remarkably soft-spoken and kind. A drunk fisherman was sitting at the bar and I talked with him about my problem with seasickness. There was a jukebox in the corner and I played The Beatles Birthday song for myself. When we drove away at the end of the week, past Annie's Tavern where we went with Stephen Weber the year before, past Coffee Girl and the old pier, past the gas station where we stopped on our way home from our honeymoon and I made meat and cheese sandwiches from crackers in the little cooler in the backseat of our rental car, I cried.

Autumn has always felt more like the New Year. Last week, I saw the first hint of tiny red leaves on the sidewalk downtown, Robert has started his new job, and we will soon go to Port Townsend to celebrate our wedding anniversary. In a few days, a friend from Idaho who worked with me at Third Street Market, the boy who will forevermore still be in high school, stocking beer in the afternoons and telling me his girl problems, will get married. The day after that, I will see The Beach Boys at the Silver Reef Casino with my parents, and in October, I will return to the coast with a friend of mine for a week-long writing retreat so I can properly document the past several months of my life. I will look ahead and not behind, I will not think about how old my son would be, or wonder what the two of us would be doing today at a park instead of me sitting here with my coffee mug by the window writing about the things I've lost.