Carrot Cake

My mother bought me a one-way ticket to Portland from San Diego.

I had to put a state-line between me and him.

It doesn’t matter who. There were several. And my father.

It was two weeks before my twenty-fifth birthday.

I packed a small rainbow duffle bag of clothes and sold

my car for two hundred dollars.

When I arrived in Portland, I went straight to Powell’s Books,

a homing pigeon. I bought a hardback copy of The Little Prince.

A man in the poetry aisle invited me to coffee. I declined.

In two weeks, I found a room for rent. Two hundred dollars a month.

A small attic room with a pole in the middle of it. Someone loaned me

a single mattress and a chair. I was doing alright. I worked at a deli

with a massive cheese counter. I became a cheese expert.

I lived in the Hawthorne District, hip before there were hipsters.

I went to my first Starbucks on Hawthorne Street. The coffee tasted

like dirt to me. Undrinkable. But there was this bakery. Tiny.

Just a bit of room for customers in front of the giant glass case.

I went for the carrot cake. Just the way I liked it, but I never knew

until Portland. Warm. No raisins for pineapple. Whipped cream frosting.

I sat on a wooden bench in front of the bakery and ate it. This was when sugar

was still good. It hadn’t been given such a bad rap in the media. By scientists.

I enjoyed it without feeling guilty. I stopped feeling bad about myself in Portland.

Everything was new. I had sadness lodged in me, but I let it come out at the movie

theaters. I went to sad movies and cried. I drank wine in my room and wrote poems

about cheese. I wrote letters. This was before computers. This was when people

picked up the telephone, made a phone call, got a busy signal, and then tried later.

This was a time to enjoy cake. I was twenty-five. The cake was warm. And the fall

days lasted forever. San Diego was another world away. There was nothing cake couldn’t fix.