My Spot on the Strip

Acme Coffee

1431 SE 40th

Portland

The crazy thing about coming back to Portland is how much the place is evolving. Every time I touch down at my beloved PDX (best airport in the world, I'm sayin') and sniff the sweetness of the air up there, I get this crazy feeling that I have to see everything. Now. Otherwise I could lose the Portland pulse and not be hip to the game anymore, and that would cause me to freak out.

Take for instance, Hawthorne. SE Hawthorne has always been the street you take your out-of-towner friends to in order to show them what makes Portland different. Crunchy hemp gift stores, used clothing purveyors and of course, the Arabian Nights style Baghdad Theater.

I was tooling down the strip yesterday morning waiting for Biasi to shake the hangover and be ready to bake surprise birthday cakes with me when I ran into the newest cat to make the scene, Ken Sellens.

Ken just moved down from Bainbridge Island, which is a lovely, closeknit community a ferry ride from Seattle. We drank our morning joe and chatted for awhile about staying in the same crazy woman's guest house in Lagos, Portugal, the one where the door never worked and she woke you up at six am to ask whether you'd want the room for another night.

This summer, him and a buddy decided they wanted to open up "a coffee cart" to supplement their artist's incomes and the very next day found an ad on Craig's List for a cafe for rent.

Enter Acme Coffee, which they've set up in an old house just north of Hawthorne on SE 40th. It kinda reminds me of some of the outdoor cafes they have in Austin, Texas where there's big gardens with all kinds of mismatched seating and the general sense that beautiful, artistically genius work is getting accomplished at the tables all around you.

The place is full of functional antiques, like a massive iron fan that they've only turned on once because "it gets pretty intense out here" when it's on. They have blueberry pie.

"We have barbeques out here once a week," Ken tells me. "We close up the cafe, and this just turns into a house. As you know, there's a lot of musicians in this neighborhood, so people come up and play on the porch. This place turns into party central. Well, not really party central."

I want to go to one of these parties. Bad. But I'm doing the SF thing now, and I know that though I'm giving up my spot in P-Town, I'm leaving a vacancy that cool kids like Ken can fill, get their swing at the bikey-coffee-front porch-guitar strumming glory of it all.

I'll always be back to Portland. Even when I can't tell you where the cool bars are anymore. Even when snotty-nosed hipsters tell me and Lauren to move our place at Colonel Sommers Park because "we have a kickball game here. Every Monday. Did you just move here?" I'll still have the wearwithall to turn on my coolkid sneer and ask "where are you from? Ohio?" (nothing against Ohio)

Tear. Growing up. Oh my City of Roses, don't forget your girl!

And I love,

CD