Idaho

Not long ago, some haughty Dame, wearing just a wee bit too much jewelry for the early afternoon, came up to the bookstore's information counter and asked where she and her little party of overdressed white women might go in the neighborhood for "a decent, American meal." I wanted to say "Idaho?" -- but did not. Not good customer service, that. Instead I ran quickly through the list of ethnicities on The Ave.: Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, Jamaican, Italian, two Greeks, Mexican, etc., just to make a none too subtle point, and then suggested a pub with good sandwiches and local brews. At least a couple of the ladies seemed to take my point, and one went so far as to say that she wouldn't mind "a nice glass of beer, if it wasn't so cold outside," proving that she at least was a game gal up for a good time, weather permitting. A poll being taken by nods, the ladies repaired to the pub, or back to the suburban safety of Bellevue and The Cheesecake Factory, for all I know. Not the first time I've had this conversation.

What troubles me -- a bit -- about reporting this exchange, and my response to it, is the assumption made that the round little pink fellow with the white beard will understand and sympathize with the local, Lutheran distrust of "ethnic" spices. At the bookstore, almost daily, I am confided in by elderly locals who've assumed from my appearance that I must be a native and that I too must look at the neighborhood changing around us with regret, that I too must be nostalgic for the working class respectability lost with the last department store, and the ethnic uniformity that went from The Ave. roughly with the Ford administration or thereabouts. How many times must I hear about the good ol' days, when grandma brought little Sven to rent his first skis from the bookstore -- it's true, we did that sort of thing once upon a time, -- when a hamburger and fountain-soda, served in a glass with a paper-straw no doubt, could be had for the price of a postage stamp, and ladies in gloves and costume-brooches felt "perfectly safe" window-shopping for little Trudi's first Communion dress at eight in the evening?

Here's the thing about this all this nostalgic head wagging: I wasn't here. I remember no such thing. I'm sure the neighborhood around the bookstore was once a perfect paradise of untroubled safety, inexpensive appliances, friendly little shop-keepers and polite teenagers. I accept as given that all this, and more, was once true. It is not the wistfulness engendered by the city's loss of innocence that rankles me, though I do wonder just how many of my interlocutors remember all of this as though it really was but yesterday true. Really? Only as long ago as that? And I do notice that none of my elderly neighbors wax sentimental, at least with me, about the jolly fun that was internment of local Japanese during "The War," or grow dewy-eyed for inflation, or Boeing lay-offs, or the like. And the only reason yesteryear ever seems to rise up is to show the contrast with The Ave. as it now is: dirty, diverse, funky, dangerous, dark and disgustingly unfamiliar. Well, well.

I don't say that I don't find the drunks that stagger the street disconcerting, or that the beggars and vagabonds seen beating their poor dogs on the sidewalk aren't a depressing reality, or that I might not like a friendlier tone after dark on a cold, wet, winter evening, but, damn it, I live in a city, a city mind you, and for me that means bookstores and bars and tacos and spring-rolls and theater and street musicians and street politics and, yes, street people, it means tolerance and cabs and galleries and museums and movies and concerts, and, yes, also the occasional flash of violence, god forbid, and a mugging now and again, it means crowded buses and shoplifters and corner poets and mad men and "loose joints?" on my way up the sidewalk, it means rudeness and noise and excitement and more than a little discomfort now and again before I'm snug once more at home.

The worst of the times for me now is not that this is not the little, white town I grew up in. I thank the stars above -- not that one ever sees them in Seattle -- that I do not live there anymore. No. The worst of the times for me is that someone, anyone, as a perfectly lovely little white lady did just yesterday, could still, when asking for a suggestion of a new novel, confide with a smile that what she did not want was "one of those awful (East) Indian things, with all that suffering and so on, you know" and go on to rule out fiction by a West African novelist, a Jamaican woman, and a suspicious sounding Turk. All the while, this old darling kept not quite saying just what she wanted, or what she meant not quite to say, even as she insisted she wanted "something new, something that I haven't read a hundred times before." Right. I wanted to accommodate her, and did, but I just could not escape that all too familiar nudge. I resented it, but it's not my place to ask her to stop it, not in so many words. It's retail, after all. Want to sell her a book. At last I found her a nice, safe, white Canadian. She seemed enormously relieved to learn there was no hint of sexual deviation, overt feminism, racial tension or prolonged suffering anywhere in the thing. I would have left her to it, and felt myself well done with her, had she not then had to ask:

"Know any place I can get a decent meal around here? And please God, not one of those awful Greek things! Know anyplace with just, you know, American food?"

Idaho?