Breaking Bread v.2

Leah and I took a rest in Portland this weekend, hitting the Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Powell's City of Books adjacent to the Pearl District. We woke Monday morning and took off on foot looking for a great place for breakfast.

Some say the increased use of the word "bistro" is suggesting too much, and that the true attitude of the bistro can only be delivered in Paris. Nonsense.

We pulled up at the Everett Street Bistro in the heart of the Pearl District with our appetites in high gear, which is good, because the fare is plentiful and yummy.

Patrons are wedged in pretty tight, but the white paint, tall windows, and high ceilings lend to the place an openness that makes the close tables bearable. Plus, there's a hint of Europe in sitting near enough to the neighboring table to hear an entire conversation.

Our waiter, J.C., embodied the Bohemian atmosphere of the place, complete with tattoos, black-rimmed glasses, and not-really blonde hair. He came swashbuckling up to our table.

"How we doin'?" he inquired, expectantly.

"Good, man, how are you today?" I shot back. Leah and I smiled at him.

"Workin'," he said, smiling back and moving his head on his neck like a pigeon. "Workin' and twerkin'."

"Cool." I finished. It was going to be an interesting experience, even if the food sucked. Which it patently did not.

We ordered coffee, which comes from Sleepy Monk Coffee Roasters in Cannon Beach, Oregon.

Leah just looked at me. "Twerking?" she said, with the end upturned like a question. I widened my eyes and shrugged, which is all I could really do. Come to find out, the urban slang term twerking is like shaking your butt while you're dancing. It has it's origin in the word "footwork." Get it? Twerk.

Anyway, while J.C. was shaking his butt bringing us coffee refills, we enjoyed a brunch-type-thing of corned beef hash (for me) and a beautiful looking ham and cheese and egg pannini (for Leah).

We'll be going back. Wanna come with?

Listening

Lately I've been listening to:

• Foo Fighters, Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace


• Elliott Smith, From a Basement On a Hill


• Arcade Fire, Funeral


• Jack Johnson, Sleep Through the Static


• Crowded House, Time On Earth


• Red Hot Chili Peppers, Stadium Ardcadium


• Derek Webb, I See Things Upside Down


• The Shins, Wincing the Night Away


• Calexico, Garden Ruin


• Pat Metheny, Day Trip


• Herbie Hancock, River: The Joni Letters


• Brad Mehldau, House On Hill

Aural History

I've been listening to music since I was a little guy. I was probably five years old when I got my first plastic little record player that played the 45 rpm records you could buy for less than a dollar. I'd sit in my bedroon for hours and listen to my stack of songs over and over again. Later I got my music from the radio through a silver Motorola the size of one of those old chalkboard erasers. On warm summer evenings, safe on my pastoral country farm in central Illinois, I could stay up late enough for the multitude of radio signals to fall silent, making way for the juggernaut WLS-AM from Chicago. The music from another world, tinny and thin, but thick with magic and promise. Later, as a teenager, I moved to that big city of the big shoulders and found the magic going deeper with FM album rock stations and no commercials, like now there were fewer people peering in.

Listening to music is like smelling flowers. Or maybe more accurately, it's like looking at flowers up close, detecting the texture of each leaf and bud, peering into the blooms to discover new worlds of detail. Music is like so much of nature, which seems at first to be random, but when you look up close, down deep, you find that everything God created works together in some knit-together way. Music is knit like this – and it's like math, random yet orderly, turbulent yet predictable.

One more thing that it is: it's a gift God gave us to express something inside us that is otherwise inexpressible, yet it's a powerful force that tells us something, too. Inexplicably, lyrics written by a stranger, when they're wrapped in sound waves, might become our own story, one we can access even if we are a thousand light-years removed from the truth of it. Only God has the power to connect us all in such powerful ways.