Joseph and I moved to Portland Oregon in August 1994, after his lay-off from Pesa Switching Systems in Huntsville, AL.  I was very naïve and not at all “worldly” then and the move was greeted with awe and wonder.  The following letter really shows my naivete and back-woodsiness!  I’d never been very many places other than Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.  Gee, things were different in Portland, OR.

During the first few years we lived in Oregon, my Aunt Hilma was living.  She was one of the constants in my life and I loved her fiercely.  She treated me like the daughter she never had.  She treated Joseph like a son and we will never forget her “bucket steak and gravy”, (smothered cube steak.)  I think it was called bucket steak because she used to buy it in a cardboard bucket from the meat packer in Elba.   It was both the comfort food and delicacy of my life.  Joseph loved it as much as I did and he still cooks it today – as he is the primary cook in the family.

I wrote Aunt Hilma letters (in addition to weekly phone calls) and she kept some of the letters.  I was not here when the disposition of her things happened after her death, but I did receive a few of these letters that I had written her.  She had saved so many of them!  The following letter was written by me to Aunt Hilma on October 1, 1994, about a month after we moved to Portland:

                Dear Aunt Hilma and Clint,

                We think of you often – not a day goes by that we don’t think of you.  I hope both of you are doing well health-wise.  I hate being so far away.  I finally called Daddy the other day.  He talked to me like nothing had ever happened and I did the same. *  He said he still had not heard from the court about his divorce.

                This is the city of roses.  It is famous for it.  The first weekend we were here, they had a rose show in the Washington Square Mall.   There were 2-3 thousand roses – from micro-miniatures to roses as big as a house, well, maybe not quite as big as a house, but they have rhododendrons as big as houses!  There’s one outside Joseph’s office!

                Joseph has reprimanded me for wandering, so let’s start at the beginning, (you know how he likes to tell people what to do and how to do it!)

                Joseph was waiting at the airport when I got in – 1 PM Portland time.  We took all the suitcases to the rental car and headed home.  The airport is on the far east side of town.  The apartment we live in is on the far west side of town.  It takes about 30-35 minutes in good traffic to drive from the airport to home.  Naturally, it took us 6 hours to get there.  We got on the road, decided to eat lunch at went looking for a restaurant.  Being new in this town, and wanting to find some place nice, we ended up lost, wandering around in some strange part of town.  We finally found a nice restaurant, NEWPORT BAY.  It is seafood, slightly higher class than Red Lobster.  We had a delicious meal and everyone was friendly.  The waiter suggested that we have Marionberry Pie for dessert.  The berries are grown only in Marion County, Oregon, but they tasted like a mixture of blackberries and raspberries to us.  It was delicious.

                We left there and found our way back to the interstate and continued on the way, Since Joseph had already been exploring and knew how to get to my office, we stopped there.  We got to meet my boss, after having sat on the airplane for 6 hours, driving around lost for 2 hours and feeling as though I had just fallen off the turnip truck.  Actually, I cleaned up rather nicely before going there.  NEWPORT BAY had hairspray, lotion, fragrances, and all sorts of stuff in the restroom. 

                My boss is very nice – he had a kidney transplant 3 years ago and his wife is Italian!  His son in law is Syrian and is an engineer.  How’s that for 45 minutes in the office!  Everyone was very friendly.  Joseph had made such an impression at the other office where he had talked to the assistant manager while he was out here on his interview, that they wanted to hire HIM!  They told my manager that if I didn’t work out, they’d take Joseph instead!

                The office space is nice – modern – an office complex called Providence Park, which is just down the street from Providence Hospital.  Their desks are not as updated as Albertville’s, but they do have more computers.

                Portland is divided into quarters.  The Willamette River (pronounced Wil lam’ it – rhymes with dammit) runs north and south, dividing the city into East and West.  There is a major road, Burnside Avenue, which runs East and West dividing the city into North and South.  We were moving from the Northeast to the Northwest and driving across the Willamette River.  There is a real tall bridge- it must be 30 stories tall – or taller.  From this bridge you can see all downtown Portland.  It is beautiful – especially at night.  The tall buildings, the old churches, modern buildings, the boats, and the beautiful mountains in the background.  As I was flying in, I could see Mt St Helen, Mount Jefferson and looked UP at Mt Hood.  It was a breathtaking sight.

                After we crossed over the river, we went up what we would call a mountain in AL, but here is just a hill.  Over the top of the mountain, the city of Portland disappeared behind us.  We were looking toward the west and could see 30-40 miles.  We had about 5 more miles to go before we got to our part of town.  It is nice, because Beaverton is a good-sized city, but it has the atmosphere of a small town and is just a few minutes from Portland and the many things a large city offers.  We finally got to the apartment about 6 PM.  It is a nice apartment.  They call it a luxury apartment.  I don’t think you’d call it that, but it does have a fireplace.  BUT IT DOESN’T HAVE A RECLINER!!

                We unloaded the car, hung up all my clothes and hit the road.  We had exploring to do.  Our first stop was a grocery store – SAFEWAY.  If you took every grocery store in Albertville and Guntersville and packed them all together – it would be about the size of SAFEWAY.  There are 10 stores that size within a 5-mile radius – 3 of them within a mile.  Every one of them has a bakery where they really bake bread – a fish market with everything from whole steelhead fresh salmon to octopus.  Not only that, but prices are also no higher than AL and NO TAX!!!

                We drove back to Portland to see the city and all the lights at night.  We finally called it a night about 10 PM PST, why did I feel like I had been up for 49 ½ hours? 

                On Friday, the next day, we went exploring again.  Joseph took me to Tektronix, where he works, and to Beaverton, the little town we live in.  It is not really so little – it’s about one half the size of Huntsville.  We went looking at some houses and saw some real pretty $200-300 thousand ones!  As we were driving to COSTCO (like Sam’S, but BIGGER), sitting at the traffic light, waiting to turn left and you will never guess what happened!  A United Van Lines truck passed us heading the other way.  Sitting on a car hauler over the cab of the truck was BERTHA – our Olds Cutlass!!!  What are the odds???  Naturally, we cut a U-turn and followed that truck.  When he got to the United Van Lines place, we caught him and told him that it was our car and we picked up Bertha.  Saved him the trouble of having to track us down.  She had been on there backwards and her rear end had 4 inches of bug guts plastered on it.  That was OK, she made it fine.

                We set up new bank accounts and they gave us new credit cards at one credit union.  It is all very high tech, our computer can tell their computer and we can transfer money from our checking to savings and from Joseph’s account to mine, etc.  We now have enough VISAs and Mastercards that we have a separate wallet for them – we ought to use them all and run away to Tahiti!

                Saturday, the relocation lady met us and was very informative.  She told us how to pronounce Willamette and taught us the proper Portlander way of ordering coffee – latte’, skinny latte’, double latte’ latte flat?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!These are all kinds of espresso.  They have these little espresso wagons – sort of like Fotomat booths in mall parking lots where you can drive up and have a latte’.  We have definitely moved into yuppieville.

                The relocation lady set us up with a real estate man.  He met us and took us to see 10 homes.  They ranged from $130,000 for 1300 square feet to $202,000 for 2200 square feet.  Naturally all the ones we liked were all closer to 200K than 130K.  The taxes on these houses ranged from $2500 yearly up to $3500 yearly- yes, that’s right!  It didn’t matter how much the house cost, – every home we saw had rose bushes and immaculate lawns (even though the yards are only 3 feet wide.)  Joseph probably won’t be happy here – not much grass – the lots are the size of your back porch!  We spent the entire afternoon looking at houses and were exhausted.  Naturally, we got up Sunday and went looking for more, only this time, we shopped for cars and houses.  Joseph was still driving his rental car that Tektronix furnished him, and we needed to get a car soon.  He had given up his dream of a 95 Trans AM when we saw the prices of houses, or at least put it on hold.  He decided to look for a Nissan 300 ZX- like the one he had had – only newer.  That day, we also practiced driving from home to Social Security three times.  I still turned the wrong direction when we neared home – I am directionally disadvantaged.  Do you think I could qualify for disability?  I had the getting to work part down pat – it was the getting home part that I really had to have remedial training for.

                Since Monday was going to be my first day at work, we called it a night.  On Monday morning, I got up and dressed and Joseph sent me off to work – off to face my new challenge.  When I got home that night, I was crying and sure that we had done the WRONG THING!!!  My commute of 20 minutes on Sunday had turned into a 45-minute, bumper to bumper hair -raising 15 MPH chase, until I got to that 30-story high bridge – then everyone wanted to go 90 MPH.  A man from California shot me a bird for going too slow.  They had had a welcome party for me at work and I missed it all by 5 minutes because of the traffic.  Thank goodness, we have flextime.  Several people were out that day and my new boss bombarded me with interviews.  I couldn’t find anything, I couldn’t speak Vietnamese – my first interview spoke no English, and my next client slept through the interview.  I was overwhelmed.  The ride home was miserable, but it wasn’t as bad as the ride in that morning.  As I walked out of the office, my boss asked me to please come back on Tuesday.  I made it home, Joseph prepared supper* and petted me and Tuesday morning seemed better.  The commute has not seemed too bad since that day and things at work are much better.  This Friday, my boss told me that he understood that I was not at my comfort level with the job, but that he was ecstatic because I had hit the ground running and kept it up.  Somehow, I felt like I might get run over if I didn’t.  They do things so very differently here.  None of the detailed organization that was in my old office.  One of my favorite co-workers is Sherrill – she’s from Arkansas and has been most helpful.  Everyone was very nice and all of them recommended housing areas and restaurants.

                After the first day or two, I am now sure that we made the right decision. We spent most of that first week looking at cars after work.  We didn’t really get a chance to sit down and catch our breath.  On Saturday, I gave Joseph an ULTIMATUM, WE WILL BUY A CAR TODAY!  We started early and drove to what seemed like every car dealer in this state.  We were looking for the 300 ZX.  We found one that was pretty about noon but kept looking.  Finally, at 9 PM. We decided to buy the pretty one, made an offer and bought the car.  It is burgundy with a red interior, 1985 Nissan 300 ZX with T-tops.  Clean as a whistle and runs like the wind.  Her name is RUBY.  One of the car salesmen gave us the name of an Italian restaurant near the car lot.  Ernesto’s!  It is great – we’ve found another Fratelli’s.

                After supper, we drove all the way across town to the airport to return the rental car at midnight.  I got to drive Ruby to the airport, but Joseph won’t let me drive her anymore.  He thinks he’s 16 again!

                Sunday, we got up to a gorgeous sunny, 85 degrees.  The weather has been beautiful.  We decided to take Ruby to the beach.  We took off the T-Tops, loaded into the car in our shorts and t-shirts and headed west to the Pacific Ocean.  We drove through some of the most beautiful countryside that I’ve ever seen.  There is a mountain chain along the Oregon coastline that is covered with a lot of old growth forest.  This road cuts right through that mountain chain.  It was fun flying with Ruby and listening to jazz music.  On the west side of that mountain chain was a COLD FRONT!  Because of the cold front meeting the warm front from Portland, the coast was fogged in, cold and miserable.  We looked around this cute tourist town called Seaside, but soon put the T-Tops back on our car and came home!!!  We learned later that if the weather is beautiful in Portland, the beach will be miserable because of the fronts meeting.  We were kind of disappointed because we had been told that it was time for the humpback whales to migrate past Oregon, don’t know if they were going north or south, but we figured south.  You are supposed to be able to see them go by.  As it was, all we saw was kids in big thick jackets playing on the beach. As soon as we crossed the mountains, it was beautiful weather again. 

                This week has been more peaceful.  Since we bought the car, we’ve actually sat around the apartment for a night or two.  We’ve been to the movies (there are 7 theaters within ½ mile) three times already.

                This brings us to today.  We looked at houses all morning and found one I really like on Tiger Lily Lane.  I think it may be the wrong direction from my work, but it is a good price and in a good neighborhood.  After looking at houses for 5-6 hours, we went to downtown Portland to the Saturday Market.  It is like the biggest craft show I have ever seen – and it’s every Saturday and Sunday.  You’d love it!  They have all kinds of stuff, things to eat, things to buy and things to see – they even have an Ethiopian Food Booth (I kept thinking I’d see a chicken running).  They have all kinds of crafts you could learn to do.  They have musicians playing- their instrument cases spread open for your donations.  (Jason would love it).  There is a section in the Friday paper that identifies everything happening in the area.  There is a big home show that we are going to visit tomorrow, there is a multimedia exposition at the Orego0n Museum of Science and Industry.  There are several plays and several operas playing this weekend, including La Boheme.  We aren’t going to see it.  One more thing we must tell you – we visited this bookstore – it is called Powell’s and is about three times the size of the Boaz Walmart.  We have never seen a bookstore that large.  They have a section of children’s books the size of Foodland. The bookshelves are 12 ft tall and loaded – it’s unbelievable.  They give you a map when you go in.  Their technical section got so large that they opened a separate building to house it.  That building is about the size of Foodland, too.

                The wonderful thing about Portland is that the downtown area is so ALIVE!  Bustling people and things going on.  I hope you come soon but rest up good before you do – cause it’s exhausting to do all the wonderful things to do here.

                I’d better go before I bore you to death.  Take care, save money, and come on out!!                                                                                                                       Love,                                                                                                                                Elaine and Joseph

I hope that this has not bored YOU to death, either.  I just thought it was interesting to relive a few moments of my life almost 30 years ago!    This letter brings back such memories!  They seem like yesterday.  Back then, Portland was a vibrant, beautiful place to be.  Safe to walk the downtown streets at night or day! Our time in Portland was the highlight of my life.

I would not go back there today for anything.  The city has turned into a cesspool of homelessness, drug use flagrantly in the streets.  It is a shame that one of the former gems of the country has fallen so low. 

Now, I am glad to be in Alabama (missing Texas a little), but still happy to be home.

•  My Dad had said some very ugly things to me about us moving to Portland.

•  My comment about Joseph cooking supper – we had recently discovered Tillamook Cheese and Safeway Baguettes.  We had thick toasted cheese sandwiches every night for two weeks! And gained 10 pounds!