GOD’S PORTLANDIA HEART - A chance meeting under the most bizarre circumstances
For our 20th wedding anniversary, Rosa was for some reason dead-set on coming to the Pacific Northwest - specifically Seattle and Portland. Of course the Pacific Northwest is legendary for being one of the most beautiful places in the world. But this was strange because there’s a LOT of beautiful places we could have gone, and Rosa’s only real connection was watching the Goonies as a kid, Twin Peaks in her teens and more recently Portlandia, which really just paints this area as a bunch of eccentrics she would typically want to avoid. But because of the whole COVID-19 thing, ticket prices were cheap so I agreed that we should go.
Being lifelong midwesterners, we hardly know anybody at all in this part of the country. There’s Oscar and Maria, a couple we knew from our home back in Kansas that had recently moved to Bellevue (a Seattle suburb), and an old friend Krista that we had heard lived in Portland. But we hadn’t seen Krista in almost 20 years. Even though at that time we were unbelievably close with her and her husband Stephen, they divorced and we all parted ways - so we had long assumed we were basically estranged.
We contacted Oscar and Maria and they offered to let us stay with them in their apartment. Oscar is a Bellevue police officer who recently transferred from Topeka, typically a much rougher place, but was currently dealing with extreme protests in Seattle ignited by the killing of George Floyd that had now spiraled into an anti-police movement (there were signs and graffiti everywhere that said ‘Defund the Police’ or the way scarier ’HUNT THE COPS’). This was definitely more than he’d signed up for.
Oscar had been assigned to the front lines of the protests just days before, and still seemed rattled as he recounted stories while driving us past smashed fast food signs, broken windows and boarded-up storefronts. Because of the looting, some of the wealthier companies had hired teams of mercenaries to come in and seize assets before the looters had the chance. A neighborhood in Seattle had been occupied by these protestors (‘CHAZ’ or ‘CHOP’) and reports of rapes and shootings without law enforcement sounded like something out of Mad Max.
Oscar and Maria bought us tickets for a helicopter ride as an anniversary gift, so even though that sounded kind of scary, we went with it. When hovering above Seattle, I asked the pilot if she could fly us over CHAZ/CHOP so I could see it myself. The helicopter made a hard left and in about 30 seconds we were looking down at the area the whole country was freaking out about. I expected to see massive crowds, buildings on fire, cars overturned. But it honestly looked more like a couple hundred people camping in a baseball field with some community gardens set up in a feeble effort to self sustain.
“Is this really it? Are we missing something?” I said into my headset.
“That’s it!” responded the helicopter pilot.
The next day I really wanted to see Kurt Cobain’s house since I was a big Nirvana fan in my early teens. I also have a morbidly curious side, so seeing the place he committed suicide just made sense to me. Oscar graciously agreed to drive Rosa and I so we headed out. When we neared the house I almost lost my nerve. I wasn’t expecting such a posh neighborhood, and I didn’t want to look like just another tourist showing up to exploit a tragedy. We actually drove right past it at first without even realizing because the whole yard is full of tall trees and bushes, completely hiding the house from view.
We made a U-turn and parked across the street. Next to the old Cobain property, there’s an empty lot with a single bench underneath a tall tree. It really looked out of place so I’m assuming that’s where people go to pay their respects. The park was strangely quiet, and there wasn’t anyone around. No big shrines or candles like I expected. I had the sobering realization that it had been almost 30 years since Kurt had died, and the hype was probably finally subsiding.
We walked up to the bench and noticed there were openings in the wooded area separating us from the Cobain property, so of course I headed in and could see the top of the Cobain house through the trees. I got closer and could now see quite a bit more than I expected. There was a second story window that was propped open, and in my imagination that was probably the very room where Kurt Cobain ended it all. The event that had rocked the music world now just seemed very real and sad. Like the difference between hearing booming gunfire in the movies and hearing the quick staccato ‘POP’ of a gunshot in real life. Fantasy vs reality. Speaking of, I later read that Cobain actually killed himself above the garage - which has since been demolished.
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We stayed with Oscar and Maria for a couple of days, enjoying local cuisine and several epic hiking trails before taking the train to Portland - just the two of us. Once we boarded, there was a homeless-looking guy who came in and sat in the seat across the aisle with a suitcase full of pill bottles. He kept taking out different bottles and shaking them, as if to make sure the contents were still secure.
When I finally glanced over, he had foil spread out on his lap with a syringe and was wrapping his arm with a black nylon belt. He kept staring right at me and started getting more agitated. He started to curse at me under his breath, and because I know from my time working with homeless back in Topeka that situations like this can escalate pretty quickly, I convinced Rosa we needed to grab our stuff and move to a different train car.
Why were we taking a train to Portland? We weren’t entirely sure. We knew it was a quirky town from the Portlandia show, and assumed it had a lot of artsy places to explore, but we really had no agenda. Rosa had picked up a free Portland tourism magazine and kept trying to get me to look through it and decide what I wanted to do once we got there, but I was pretty sure we could just go with the flow and find cool things to entertain ourselves without too much effort. From my experience, the more planning, the more likelihood for disappointment!
We got to Portland and checked into our AirBNB, the first tiny home we’ve ever stayed in. That night after we climbed up into the shallow loft and slithered onto the mattress making sure we didn’t bump our heads on the low-hanging ceiling, we laid side by side on our phones, mindlessly scrolling through the latest worthless social media garbage. Since we were in Portland, I decided to try and find our old friend Krista on Instagram, and found her immediately.
There she was, after 20 years. She looked like a Portland hipster version of her younger, tamer self. She was surrounded by several new children Rosa and I never had the chance to meet. And her twins who were tiny one-year-olds in diapers in our minds were now full-blown adults. Looking through the images was like some strange sort of time travel. How was it even possible that 20 years had passed in the blink of an eye? I looked over at Rosa and said “I bet we somehow see Krista tomorrow.”
“What? Do you know how big Portland is?”
“Well I just have a feeling we’ll run into her.”
“That would be super awkward. I’m not sure what I would say or do.”
It probably would be awkward. We rolled over and went to sleep.
****************
We woke up the next morning, made some coffee, and Rosa handed me the Portland tourism magazine again.
“Have you decided where you want to go?”
Knowing I couldn’t dodge the question anymore and needed to give some kind of answer, I quickly flipped through the pages and saw something about a thrift shop in the ‘Hawthorne neighborhood.’ I decided that was as good as any place, even if I would have been just as happy walking around the neighborhood where we were staying. We requested an UBER and in no time we were HEADED TO HAWTHORNE!
Our UBER driver was ‘deaf’ according to his profile on the app and oversized hearing aids, but nevertheless he kept talking to us and asking questions in a super quiet, almost imperceivable, voice. Rosa and I did our best to communicate with him, talking loudly so he had the chance to pick up at least some of what we were saying. All of us were wearing face masks because of COVID-19, which only made things even more comical as he continued to whisper and we kept yelling. We pulled into the Hawthorne neighborhood and I yelled at him to drop us off anywhere since we didn’t really have an actual destination or agenda.
When we got out on the street, the neighborhood looked a little rough. More boarded up windows, graffiti and homeless in tents on the sidewalk. And to top it off it looked like a lot of the stores were closed because of the pandemic. Rosa was nervous and I had to convince her to just follow me. Even though I didn’t have a plan, or have any idea where we were, I could see that several blocks down there appeared to be lit up storefronts with actual traffic outside. And past this area there were towering trees that I was super intrigued by. Maybe there were some trails we could check out?
As we walked in this direction, we saw a coffee shop that also sold local artisan jewelry, which was perfect because we wanted to get our friend Maria a necklace for her birthday (and for letting us stay at her and Oscar’s place back in Seattle). We quickly found the perfect one and as we were checking out the cashier asked us where we were from. Rosa explained that we were from Kansas, here to celebrate our 20th anniversary, and that she hoped we weren’t jerks for traveling during the pandemic. The cashier assured us something I already figured - that they needed people like us in order to survive, and she thanked us for being brave enough to venture out. We were in fact following protocol - no signs of sickness, practicing social distancing by 6 feet and wearing face masks, and had already quarantined for months, so I wasn’t feeling too guilty.
“I noticed some trees up the road, are there hiking trails up there we could check out?” I cut in. The cashier told us there was a nice park (‘Laurelhurst’) about 6 blocks to the North that we should definitely visit, so Rosa and I put that on our to-do list for the afternoon. From there we stopped in at several random shops (who seemed to open there doors to us as we approached), eventually landing at a little Mexican cafe for taquitos, guacamole, and margaritas.
Rosa and I sat out on the patio and began to reflect on the 20 years of marriage we had shared. We had been through so many hard times, but even more amazing times. It seemed our whole marriage had been leading up to this, sitting together sipping margaritas in near-perfect weather. The whole trip had felt divinely blessed, as if we were being honored for committing to each other and sticking it out for 20 years. Even so, none of this felt deserved. We were, and are still, imperfect people.
In this rare moment of clarity I was struck with an overwhelming sense of God’s love for me. I was deeply loved, and there was nothing I could do to change this fact. This unconditional love wasn’t about my current comfortable, good circumstances. These conditions were just a window used to help me get a glimpse of God’s love for me. Like an amazing dad, God was telling me that I had done well in my marriage, and was encouraging me to press on. It was like I was receiving a continual flow of words, without hearing actual words, if that makes any sense.
I have known about God’s unconditional love for most of my life, but had never actually felt it so deeply. I closed my eyes and held back tears so I wouldn’t make a scene. I was definitely having a moment! Rosa looked up and saw a black and white decal stuck on the stop sign over where we were eating:
JESUS ANSWERED, I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH & THE LIFE - JOHN 14:6
As I turned and read it for myself, Rosa said “Whoa - God is here!!”
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Rosa and I decided to head to the park, which had now become our destination for the day. There was a young guy with long, brown hair out on the sidewalk playing an electric guitar plugged into a little battery-powered amplifier. He had the reverb turned way up so everything he was playing sounded heavenly.
When he stopped playing and we briefly chatted about where we were from, how nice his playing was (I think I said something like “Reverb covers a multitude of sins, AM I RIGHT!?”), I laid down a dollar bill and then asked him if we were going the right way to get to Laurelhurst Park. He told us we were basically headed in the wrong direction, but we could still get there this way if we didn’t mind a slightly longer walk. We decided just to keep going. As we walked away, the guitar player held out his hand, pointed his pick at me and said “GOD BLESS YOU!” I looked at Rosa and said “Hmmmm - you don’t hear that a lot any more…”
After walking through several blocks of cute artisan-crafted, brightly-colored houses that Rosa and I both swore we’d seen on several episodes of Portlandia, we arrived at the park. At first it was underwhelming. There were a couple basketball courts, some playground equipment and picnic tables. This couldn’t be the place so many were raving about, right? Then we noticed there was a pathway that led over a small hill and to the ACTUAL park, which was a huge maze of trails and woods, all looping around a big pond with some of the bluest water I’ve ever seen.
Rosa spotted an open bench, and we headed toward it. This bench was all alone between the sidewalk and the pond, facing away from the sidewalk and out toward the blue water. It seemed to have a single shaft of light cutting through the trees illuminating it. There was something special about this bench, but when we got to it we realized there was a huge cluster of ugly bushes filled with tangled litter obscuring the view of the pond. We were tired from walking all day so we didn’t care.
We each plopped down and pulled out our phones to get caught up on missed emails and other notifications. We sat in silence for several minutes, enjoying the peace and the break. Literally no agenda. Several people walked by quietly behind us, but we were facing away and barely noticed. I was almost falling asleep.
Suddenly Rosa grabbed my leg hard.
“DAN - I THINK THAT’S KRISTA! I JUST HEARD HER VOICE AND I THINK SHE JUST WALKED BY RIGHT BEHIND US!! My heart is beating so fast right now!!”
I looked behind us and saw two women with a couple little kids walking down the sidewalk away from the bench we were sitting on.
“I heard her voice. I know that’s her! Am I crazy!?”
We sat there and watched the small group walk around to the other side of the pond. I thought about the likelihood of actually running into Krista after almost 20 years - the day after I said ‘I bet we run into Krista tomorrow.’ Portland has a population of almost 600,000 people. Not to mention the infinite combination of time and place for this to actually happen. Maybe it’s somebody that looks and sounds like Krista? But one of those kids looks like one of the kids I saw on her Instagram last night. Wait. Is that creepy? Am I just insane at this point!?
I finally took Rosa by the hand and said “I think if that is in fact Krista, there’s a reason we’re seeing her and we need to at least say hi.”
“But maybe we were just supposed to see her, and that’s it, and now we can leave!?”
“I don’t think so. And what harm could it do to just tell her ‘Hi!’?” I know it’s been almost 20 years, but she won’t care! Right!?”
The thing is, years before Rosa had seen Krista post some things on social media that gave us the impression that she had changed from the person we once knew. We got the impression that she had lost the faith we had once shared (one of the most important parts of our friendship) and based on this we assumed that Krista probably didn’t want anything to do with us anymore. But this is an assumption based in fear, and this kind of fear is the enemy of real love.
We got up and made our way the short distance to where the two ladies and two children were sitting on the edge of the pond. The young boy started to climb the tree. He looked exactly like the kid I’d seen on Instagram the night before. This was a little creepy. Rosa and I took some steps back and stood in the shade of a nearby tree, still watching the group, trying to determine if we were hallucinating together, or if we were in fact looking at our long lost friend.
“Who’s the other lady with her? Maybe a friend?” Rosa whispered.
I pulled up her Instagram and suddenly realized the second woman was actually Krista’s daughter. She had a very distinct, unique haircut - a super-cool, permed blonde hipster mullet. Very Portland! Once one of the tiny twins we used to babysit and had spent countless hours with, she was now a full blown ADULT. And if that was Krista’s daughter, then the other lady sitting by the pond was indeed Krista.
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Rosa’s social anxiety was kicking in and she was starting to breathe heavily. I could tell her heart was beating out of her chest.
“It’s going to be OK - it’s just Krista! There’s no way she’s mad at us. Even if it’s been 20 years, I bet she’ll just be happy to see us…”
As I said the words I started to doubt myself. Was there a reason she hadn’t reached out in 20 years? Was there a forgotten reason we hadn’t tried to reach out to her? Is it possible she hasn’t wanted to see us? That this would be intruding on an otherwise peaceful Friday afternoon for her and her family? Not to mention the COVID concerns!
The questions started piling up in my head as Rosa and I grabbed hands and started walking toward the group at the pond. We held onto each other as we slowly and carefully took each step. Now MY heart was beating hard and fast. The woman we knew was Krista stood up and playfully offered one of the kids a piggy back ride when she looked up and noticed this odd couple awkwardly creeping toward her (us).
Rosa let out a shaky “K…RRIISSSSTA!?”
Krista looked at us with a puzzled expression.
“Yes? Do I … know you?”
I jumped in … “Hey Krista! It’s us - you’re old best friends!”
Krista’s face slowly went from a look of concern, to confusion - then her eyes widened as her mind reached back 20 years and put the puzzle together before a huge smile covered her face.
“DAN AND ROSA?!?!! WHAT …. HOW!? WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE!?”
Krista ran to us and gave us each a huge hug. In an instant Rosa and I knew we didn’t have anything to worry about. Our old best friend was back and hadn’t changed a bit. What a relief!
We all stood there staring at each other in disbelief, piecing the whole story together as I continually swore that Rosa and I hadn’t stalked them … or maybe I joked that we HAD stalked them … it was kind of a blur. I admitted to Krista that I somehow had a premonition that we were going to run into her, and that we had even talked about it the night before. And that we had been afraid that when it happened it was probably going to be awkward given all the time that had passed without any contact.
Krista explained that after the divorce she assumed that Rosa and I were probably no longer interested in a friendship with her, so she just gave us our space and moved on. But just this morning she had prayed with her now 20-year-old daughter that ‘something magical would happen today.’ Like Rosa and I, she didn’t know why she was drawn to the pond. Krista had even pushed off work to just take a day to ‘go exploring with the kids.’ And even more unbelievable, Krista didn’t actually even live in Portland, but 22 miles South in Oregon City.
The chances of us crossing paths was astronomically slim. But here we were, standing next to a sparkling blue pond, in some sort of divinely planned meeting.
****************
This is when it all started to really hit me how surreal the situation was. Like waking up from a 20-year coma and realizing you have two decades to catch up on. We had all lived totally separate lives, yet here we were again, our paths converging at the same point. Was I dreaming all of this? It definitely felt like it.
After about 45 minutes on the highway, we eventually pulled up to their ‘craftsman bungalow,’ built onto the side of a steep wooded ravine in the middle of Oregon City. Our first impression was that the house was more humble than expected. It was obviously lived in, which was a big relief to Rosa and I who had both assumed we were going to pull up to an intimidatingly sleek mansion after riding in the BMW! But this was more our style, more Krista’s style.
The house was uniquely constructed of what appeared to be cedar and pine. There was a bridge walkway leading to the front door, and inside there were angled walls, high ceilings and oddly-shaped windows high above us. The house was full of artwork - giant colorful original paintings covered the walls, and there were several sculptures, including a giant moose head David was working on.The back wall had giant windows looking down on a trampoline and a densely wooded area back about a hundred feet or so. There was a kind of floating deck (that almost felt more like a tree house) with an outdoor fireplace and makeshift detachable roof. All of this was giving off a strong Swiss Family Robinson vibe, which David later admitted was his favorite movie growing up.
Once we settled in, we played a sort of modified version of Scrabble around a giant wooden table, drank Palomas with juicy lemon slices and ended up ordering Thai takeout. As the sun went down, we made our way to the back treehouse deck and sat next to the fire under the stars. Krista’s now 20-year-old daughter joined us, and her very presence was just another reminder of the time that had passed. We talked and talked, laughing often.
20 years prior, we had all considered ourselves Christians, but didn’t really understand what that meant. Rosa and I were part of a more fundamentalist group that was big on rules and lacking common grace, and Krista and her husband at the time were part of the charismatic/Pentecostal movement which capitalized on ‘health, wealth & prosperity.’ If only we had known at the time that Jesus wasn’t about any of these things, but was actually all about the condition of our hearts. We now realized we had somehow reached this same conclusion on our own without each other’s input. Perhaps this was the big takeaway from the last 20 years.
It was finally time for Rosa and I to take the inevitable trip back to our AirBNB in Portland. On our way out of the house, Krista’s mom Sandra stopped us and handed us a framed colorful picture of a glowing red heart with a halo hovering over the top that she had beautifully illustrated with colored pencils. We had met Sandra twenty years ago, and she now lived with Krista so they could care for her as needed. Sandra was an older, more frail version of her energetic, take-on-the-world self from 20 years ago, but she still exuded the same warmth and kindness.
“Did you know that Dan and Rosa are here celebrating their 20th anniversary?” Krista asked her.
Surprised, Sandra looked over at us and said “Well I guess this is your anniversary gift!” I don’t think Sandra realized how special that gift was. We now had something tangible to perfectly memorialize the experience. I immediately recognized the image as God’s heart for me, and for all of us.
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Rosa and I are now on the flight back to Kansas. Our kids and dog are waiting for us. Hopefully my neighbors aren’t too upset because I’m sure I need to mow the lawn after being gone a week. I’m ready to get back to my normal life, but am sad I’m probably going to forget the gravity of the miracles encountered while on this trip.
I have heard some argue that life is in fact just a series of meaningless random events, but that some people constantly try to connect the dots in order to find meaning and purpose. I wonder the probability of Rosa and I finding Krista in Portland that day? Especially after finding out she doesn’t even live in Portland? I’m not a stats guy, but even I know this shouldn’t have been possible.
I think I’ll have Rosa prominently display the heart illustration on the mantle in the living room as a daily reminder that God loves us more than we can comprehend and that God does in fact have a plan and purpose for us. I can be certain I’m not just imagining that.
Wow! What a great story! Glad I stumbled into it. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Sean!
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