Musing: Peak eavesdropping season
The summer solstice is hurtling our way in the Northern Hemisphere. Here in Portland, Oregon that means the dogwoods and peonies are finishing their blooms and our daylight is up over 18 hours a day. (Fun fact: Portland, OR is actually farther north than the eponymous Portland, ME.) For me, this means one thing: it’s peak eavesdropping season. Here’s where you’ll find me trying to be sneaky about listening in over the next couple of months:
Portland Nursery (either location), the parking lot or the entrance/exit from the outdoor plant zone.
I remember coming here as a kid and sitting in the parking lot with my parents as they braced themselves to shop at the only place they had a problem with impulse spending.
“We’ll stick to the list.”
“We don’t have time to plant more than what is on the list.”
“We still have that potluck to go to that will cut into yard time.”
Even if you aren’t particularly a plant person, there’s still somehow a magical force field around this place that has you thinking “Yeah I could grow that” and filling up a cart accordingly. Portland Nursery is my favorite place to watch delusional levels of optimism play out. You can listen to people talk about their tactical plan to get three plants, and then watch them return to their car in a daze with a fully loaded double decker cart. They’ll open the back of their vehicle, and emerge from their stupor as they realize they need to play Tetris to get everything home. As they wheel back their emptied cart, you can see the number of holes they need to dig starting to dawn on them.
Powell’s Books flagship store, journal/card section near the entrance/checkout in the Orange Room.
While bookstores are generally not my jam these days*, book people absolutely are, and there’s no better place to watch them get excited than the main Powell’s with its tall shelves, piled tables, and hundreds of staff recommendations scattered throughout. The Orange Room entry is the prefect place to park yourself and watch the book fumes hit.
There are the locals with a plan, who checked the shelf location online before coming.
The locals treating themselves, whose shoulders lose tension as they walk into their paradise.
The visitors who know what they are getting into: “Meet you back here in an hour?” “Hour and a half?” “Yeah.”
The first-time visitors who can’t walk and take it in at the same time, and pause just past the entry, gasping.
The coffee shop inside is another good choice for eavesdropping, as there are reshelving carts nestled by the tables there, and it’s often where people will try to talk themselves down from buying quite so many books.
*Forced retirement from standard type sizes is a bummer. It’s analogous to going to a bookstore full of books and finding they’re all in a language you no longer read; sure, with some labor and the right phone app, you can make some headway, but it’s not the same as reading fluently.
Providore Fine Foods, the cheese counter
If you’d like to watch unhinged entitlement bounce off exquisite customer service, this is the place. So much helpful signage and so many people brazenly admitting their unwillingness to read it! People casually dropping $150 because “I want it to be a MEMORABLE cheese board.”
Providore is also one of my favorite places to go when I have $20 I don’t need to make good choices with. Their jars of individually wrapped Italian sweets get me every time. Would I like to try three kinds of lemon hard candy and three kinds of pistachio chocolates? Yes, I would.
Portland Pickles summer league baseball, Walker Stadium, any seats
Look, I’m a weirdo who actually enjoys baseball, but that is FULLY OPTIONAL. Pickles games are maybe 20% people there for the baseball and 80% people there for the vibes. It’s basically a good reason to sit outside in perfect summer weather and make idle conversation with something to look at.
Think of it like a movie theater or road trip where no one cares when you talk. There’s plenty of room around the outfield for blankets and camping chairs and for kids and dogs to frolic. Strangle little contests pop up in the infield between innings, often with a hilariously tipsy volunteer participant. Sometimes there’s a bus-turned-mobile-tattoo-shop. Usually there’s an odd food collab - both the dill cucumber kombucha and the pickle brine swirl ice cream were great. The unflavored pop rocks hot dog topping hasn’t made a re-appearance, but if it did, I would eat it again.
You never know what you’re going to overhear here, but I invariably leave a Pickles game feeling thankful for some aspect of my life I had not previously given much thought to. Truly the range of ways a loser boyfriend or loser roommate can be horrifying is astonishing. I’m still thinking of the person whose roommate was forgetful at latching cages on small pets, leading to a series of unsuccessful late night searches for: a gerbil, a hamster, a mouse, and a snake.
Did that snake eat well before it died of cold? At some point did this person have to stage an intervention to prevent a tarantula joining the household? I have so many questions. That’s the pleasure of eavesdropping, really: a story fragment you get to idly embroider as you please.