Hanging with Mr. New Ton
I was all set to get laundry done last night, and then Gabriel fucked it up! Okay, I guess I'll live. It was nice to see him. I hadn't seen him since the 4th. Twice in one calendar month! That's actually kind of rare.
He and Lea are moving in together in Columbia City, and he asked if I wanted to come down and see the new place, maybe go out for dinner. I told him I couldn't really afford dinner right now but I still would love to come see the place. He offered to buy me a drink. Who am I to turn that down?
I have since spent a little time trying to narrow down the location of the house he and Stephanie had moved into in 2005 (damn, do they both look young in those pictures . . . it was two years before Tess was even born), and which they lived in until they moved into "the Lake House" in 2008, which Stephanie still lives in to this day. (I want to say it was 2010 when Gabriel moved out of there, and moved to Tacoma.) Anyway, as much deep love as Gabriel has for Tacoma, he also told me last night he has always missed the Columbia City neighborhood, and the many small businesses along Rainier Avenue that he used to frequent and which still exist. I forgot that previous house he and Stephanie had lived in was technically in the neighboring Seward Park neighborhood.
I don't even remember what street they used to live on. It couldn't possibly have been as convenient as his new place is, all of two blocks from the Columbia City Light Rail Station and one block from the Columbia City PCC store -- which, as strange fate would have it, opened in 2015 as a replacement of the old Seward Park PCC, which itself was mere blocks from Gabriel's old house in that neighborhood. I only got reminded looking through my archives that his old house was easily walkable distance between both the Seward Park PCC and actual Seward Park itself. (Added tidbit: until it closed in 2015, Seward Park had been the second-oldest PCC store still open, having opened in 1985.) It also occurred to me last night, when Gabriel last lived in the area, Light Rail did not even exist -- he moved when it was a year away from opening.
I suppose that "main drag" on Rainier Avenue in Columbia City, which Gabriel and Lea will soon be living on, is now a good mix of recently-added modern conveniences (most notably Light Rail) and still-open business producers of nostalgia. Light Rail makes the biggest difference for me, as Seward Park was never conveniently located even for transit, and even now is a bit far off from the Light Rail route; now it takes me as little as about 35 minutes door to door to get there on Light Rail, and that's counting the roughly ten minute walk from home to the Capitol Hill Station and the few minutes it takes to walk from Columbia City Station to his new place. That's night-and-day difference compared to what it has always taken for me to visit him in Tacoma over the past decade or so.
All of this is very much with the understanding that Gabriel living in Seattle proper again is quite likely to be temporary. I mean, maybe. He did mention, and I actually asked him about this, that even though as the crow flies this place is far closer to the U District where Lea works than to Tacoma where Gabriel works, with Seattle's ridiculous traffic their commute times are actually comparable from there -- I think Gabriel said it would take Lea about 45 minutes door to door commuting to work via Light Rail, and Gabriel driving to Tacoma (opposite most commuter traffic) is more like forty minutes! So, this location is far fairer to both of them than it would seem at first glance. That said, this is sort of a trial cohabitation until it no longer feels too soon to jump into getting a mortgage together, and if and when that happens, they could wind up moving just about anywhere in the mid-Puget Sound region. Selfishly, I kind of hope Lea remains employed in the U District, which is likely to keep them tethered to Seattle proper and makes it far easier for me to hang out with one of my oldest and closest friends.
Anyway. After we established the plan via text while I was still at work, I rode my bike home; put the first load of clothes into the laundry; made dinner for both myself and for Shobhit to have once he got home from work much later; fed the cats; and was out the door just before 6:00 to go catch Light Rail. I did leave work about ten minutes early but I was still very efficient with my time for the hour or so that I was at home. He had originally suggested meeting at 7:00 but later changed it to 6:30, which worked fine for me.
The Metro online trip planner said the train I wanted to catch left at 6:07, and it was on time to the minute, surprisingly. I thus left the condo at about 5:50 to make it to that train. It was barely past 6:30 when I arrived at Columbia City Station, and he said he was at the PCC so I walked the couple of blocks to meet him there. We spent about the next two and a half hours together, while Lea was in Everett, of all places, seeing a Backstreet Boys concert with Josh, which Gabriel quite understandably had no interest in. So that left him free for the evening, right here in town.
The Columbia City PCC is kind of Shobhit's and my backup shopping store when it happens to me more convenient than the usual Greenlake Village -- if we are also going to Costco and MacPherson's Produce, for instance, and I don't need any Zevia Soda (irritatingly, Columbia City does not carry the Cherry Cola flavor, one of my four favorites). So I'm pretty familiar with that store in a way I am not with most of them, and meeting Gabriel there quite close to where he's to be living was a new experience. He walked me over to see his place first.
It's one of only three units on the second floor of a two-story building with business on ground floor, a largely brick building, and it can best be described as an old-school style loft. I would almost call it cavernous, at least currently with almost no furnishings in it. It has a kitchen marked off from the rest of the main space by a counter, much like my first studio in Belltown did; the bathroom is right off the entrance as well as the kitchen, and there are two bedroom doors to the side of the main space, but there is otherwise no defined dining room (what apartment actually has a dining room anyway, now that I think about it?) and that main space is very large and wide open, with a couple of thin structural support beams along the center-left of the rectangular space. Gabriel said the entire unit, he thought, was supposed to be about 1,700 square feet. That makes it larger than my current condo and that aforementioned first studio apartment put together.
There's a pair of hooks in the ceiling in one spot, and Gabriel said they might hang a swing there. I was envisioning something more like a playground swing, like a moron, and said someone was likely two swing into the wall, which the hooks are too close to. I was finally made to understand he meant something more akin to a porch swing. It would just hang there, not swing particularly far forward or back.
I was going to tell Gabriel he really didn't have to even buy me a drink and perhaps he could just save himself the money, but I did not realize there would really be no place to sit in the apartment, there is still so little of their stuff moved into it. There is one chair, which he sat in for a minute as we chatted and I sat leaning on an open windowsill. He then took me to a place nearby pub along Rainier, I forget which one, but he said he used to hang out there all the time when he lived in the area before. He even pointed at the bar seat he apparently used to sit in, and I got the feeling he would have sat there again, but for some other schmo who had already parked in it.
There was a cherry cider among the specials and I ordered that; it was easily one of the tastiest hard ciders I have ever had. As I told Gabriel, most har ciders are basically just the closest thing to beer that I can tolerate; this one I legitimately enjoyed.
And then, we proceeded to catch up, and it was honestly quite nice to spend some time just the two of us. I had a great time at the Fourth of July party, but group dynamics are still always very different, and don't allow for the intimacy of one on one conversation. You can bring up things you never would in group situations, no matter how much you like and/or trust everyone there. For instance, since it occurred to me earlier in the day, I decided to tell Gabriel, after we left the second place he took me to (where he had another drink and I just had water), how I find it kind of astonishing how quick he still is to open his heart to someone, after all the bullshit relationships he has been through. Lots of people in the same scenario would feel far too burned to trust and love again; Gabriel explained, in a really quite effective way, how he basically can't even help it: love is the most important value to him and it always has been. I'm not sure I have ever quite contextualized it this way, but given the years I have known him, that certainly tracks. He's the same way with his friendships, which of course is a very different kind of love than the romantic sort, but it's love all the same. And as caustic and sarcastic and quippy he and I have been to each other over many years of our knowing each other (24, to be exact!), I can still tell you this much: I actually feel truly loved by him. Particularly in recent years, when he seems to have gotten far more sentimental in his middle age. There are times when his sincerity is so jarring that I am almost tempted to wonder if something is wrong. I've had to stop myself from saying something like, "Why are you being so affectionate all of a sudden? You're not about to go jump off a bridge, are you?!" Nope. This is just a guy who has never been afraid to express emotion, but I would say in more recent years is also much more effectively in touch with them. Nothing to be afraid of!
You know what? Something only just occurred to me. It's entirely possible that it was my own change in approach to our friendship that at least partly prompted this shift on his part as well. Because I was always just kind of snotty with him by default, spend a lot of time flipping him shit just for sport, and I made a conscious decision to stop that when he was in a really low place and there just wasn't anything fun in kicking a person while they were down. Had I been just generally nicer to him earlier than that, the aforementioned jarring sincerity on his part might very well have started earlier too. I was always meaner to Gabriel than I was to any of my other friends (in that "it means he likes you if he's mean" way that his college girlfriend Suzy once stated) simply because I found I could get away with it. I thought of it as having fun with him, and I think he even regarded it that way to a large degree and he would dish some of that right back, but the older we get, the less appropriate it feels. He and I have been through and shared a lot together over two and a half decades now -- and he in particularly has endured a lot of tragic bullshit, through which I have been a consistent friend, or at least tried to be -- and I think we are therefore forever bonded. There still comes a time when you decide maybe you could just be more pleasant. I think that's kind of where we both are.
After we parted ways at the Light Rail station he had walked me back to, he texted me that it was nice to have someone who truly knows him and cares. I think I responded appropriately: You'll never escape me. He and I have the most "odd couple" relationship among all of my friends, but I guess that just proves you don't have to have a huge amount of things in common in order to connect with someone in a sustainable way. You just have to work to find where common ground does exist, and Gabriel and I did that ages ago. Now we have a massive amount of shared history too -- especially a lot of shared history we either enjoyed or appreciate -- and that alone is a huge part of what keeps us in each other's lives.
God knows Gabriel's life has changed a zillion times just in the time since he last lived in Seward Park. Me? I was working for PCC and with Shobhit then; I work for PCC and am with Shobhit now, the only major difference being that we're married now and share a condo. Gabriel kept trying to extract updates about my life from me, which is kind of hard to do because my day to day life is just steadily pleasant and enjoyable, without a lot of big news events. I did tell him about Shobhit's and my likely trip to Australia early next year, which I am very excited about.
Gabriel actually tried to go get a drink at Columbia City Theater, which happened to be where his and Stephanie's wedding reception took place. He reminded me that I once stood on stage there (oh right, I remember), and also that Jimi Hendrix once stood on that stage too (that, I did not remember). The whole neighborhood has a lot of reminders of a personal history Gabriel has there from a lifetime ago. Now he can create a new history with it, hopefully with a much brighter future.
[posted 12:20 pm]