How We Met

SFs seeking globally conscious SMs who are interested in reviving the endangered art of conversation for Sunday Salons at The Heathman. Send self-description, telephone, thought provoking topics. We're lively, healthy, over 21, professional, eclectic and ready for conversation. Are you?

On Feb. 21, 1991, the above notice appeared in the personals of Willamette Week, the longstanding alternative free weekly paper in Portland. The women who placed it had gotten the idea from the latest issue of the Utne Reader, whose cover essay addressed the revival of “salons” for intellectual and cultural conversations.

I had just arrived in town with the new year, barely seven weeks before. For more than three years, I’d been a full-time reporter for a daily newspaper downstate. Black Monday, Oct. 19, 1987, when the stock market plunged 22.6 percent in one day, was my first day of work at the News-Review … a happy day for me! I left Roseburg “in a hail of bullets” 39 months later (with three off to tramp around West Africa).

The Willamette Week ad had been placed by a group of women of a range of ages who knew one another either in a yoga group or from skiing together. One owned a local restaurant. Another was an aide to Portland’s mayor, Vera Katz. The ad received a huge response, and when the women chose whom to invite to the first meeting, they had a wealth of suitable males … far greater than their pool of SFs.

Hoping to maintain a rough balance of the sexes, one of them, Anne Lyshaug, reached out to a former coworker and asked her to join. Carole Barkley was not enthused; she’d had a hard 1990 as well (a sudden separation that ended in a rough divorce, an employer who went bankrupt while she worked there), and she was not in the mood to meet new people.

But she went along. And I met her with the others in the tea room of the Heathman Hotel, a grand edifice at SW Broadway and Salmon which dates back to 1927. Carole was absent from the second meeting of the salon (she was visiting her aunt in Florida), so I dropped her a postcard to invite her to dinner.

Who’s this guy, she asked Anne. Oh, David’s nice, but he is younger than you. Oh no, Carole said; no more younger men! Her ex had been 11 years her junior. Now hold on, Anne reminded her: You’re out of work and he’s offering to take you to dinner. Oh, right, Carole remembered.

So she accepted . . . not knowing that I, too, was unemployed, and doing temp work between runs up and down the Pacific coast from Bellingham, Everett, and Tacoma, Washington to Corvallis in my ’76 Chevy Nova, in search of another newspaper job that never turned up.

Carole chose one of her favorite restaurants, a specialist in East Indian cuisine known as Indigine (I still don’t know whether it was supposed to be four syllables with the accent on the second, or three syllables with the stress on the third), which was located at 3725 SE Division, but is long gone.

We had a lovely dinner that cost about forty dollars, as I recall. Today that’d be fairly standard, even inexpensive, especially since it included wine, but 27 years ago it was the most I’d ever paid for a meal -- which I think I managed to do without wincing.

At the end of the meal, Carole announced that her birthday was a few days hence, and she had organized a celebration at her athletic club for friends and family members who had stood by her through the previous rough year. I was welcome to join them.

What gift should you buy for a woman you barely know? I wandered Pioneer Place, and decided Godiva Chocolates were a safe bet. (And yes, they turned out to be.)

Our first kiss occurred not too many weeks after that. The place was a bench in a little park in Northwest Portland off Marshall between 19th and 20th. The park is gone now, but the aged brick wall of the old building that overlooked it (the “Baker Apartments”) continues to mark the spot for me when I go by.

Soon after, I started spending many days and nights at Carole’s apartment in Southeast, transcribing the interviews I’d done with my grandmother seven years before on her Mac IIe, making peace with her grouchy cat Shu-Bop (named after the vocal rhythm track on a Eurythmics single), and urging her to meet my family, which she resisted until November 1991.

That was it. Once she met my folks, she was hooked.

We celebrate our silver wedding anniversary this August.