TheBanyanTree: Lunch at the Portland City Grill

[Mike Pingleton]

What did you have for lunch, or is this a suspense novel?  :)
-Mike



On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 11:44 PM, Monique Colver
<monique.colver at gmail.com>wrote:

> We met a couple of Mr C's childhood friends for lunch today. Childhood, as
> in pre-high school. This will be an important fact later. One of them,
> Kenny, lives in the Portland area, but the other, Chris, was coming through
> on his way back to Anchorage, after deciding Oklahoma wasn't a good fit for
> him. He's a photographer, and going back to Alaska in time for a couple of
> wedding shoots this summer. I've never met either either of them, which is
> irrelevant to this story, but indicates how well my therapy is coming along
> (being that I met new people).
>
> That's a different story. We'll talk about how I'm helping my therapist
> decide what to do with his life later.
>
> By the time we got there, Chris and Kenny had seats in the bar next to the
> windows, with a view of Portland. Thirty stories up means it's quite a
> view, and I'd go for that alone, especially on a day like today, when the
> sun is out and you can see from miles. One of these days I'll have to take
> sash there for a lunch time celebration, but it must be on a clear sunny
> day.
>
> Our waitress was in her 20's, a nice mix of friendly and ditzy. Or maybe
> it's just the age.
>
> As the boys talked I admired the view, and tried not tell Chris he was dumb
> for saying he had to pay $5,000 to become an LLC. I try to refrain from
> insulting people when we're out socially. Both Chris and Kenny have LLC's,
> which is apparently the thing to do in one's thirties.
>
> At one point Andrew mentioned something about David, a friend from high
> school. Chris and Kenny went to a different high school, since Andrew's dad
> had moved the family to a better part of town, so they don't know David.
> Chris said, "Oh, the Asian guy, right?"
>
> I found this hilarious.
>
> Yes. David is Chinese.
>
> I found this hilarious because Chris is Korean.
>
> Yeah, the Asian guy.
>
> There was something in the way he said it, as if Asian was meant to
> encompass a subset of something. Or other.
>
> I don't know, and I didn't ask, and Andrew said, "Right."
>
> We laughed about it later.
>
> Kenny left first, because he had to get back to work, which was a block
> away. (If I were a block away from the Portland City Grill I'd be eating up
> there more often.)
>
> The three of us talked a bit more, and when we left Chris said he was going
> to visit some breweries, brewery visiting being the in thing to do around
> here. But he didn't leave . . . instead, he sidled up to the bar and
> ordered a beer, preparing to give the waitress/bartender his full spiel.
> ("I'm a photographer, I shoot fashion models . . . " which he does,
> sometimes, but mostly he doesn't. Mostly he does less glamorous
> photography.)
>
> If you've never seen How I Met Your Mother, this won't make sense, but as
> we left, Andrew said to me, "He's just like Barney," the perpetual sleazy
> player.
>
> Kenny's really nice though.
>
>
> M
> (I'm jumping back on the horse and am out of practice, so this is what you
> get.)
>