Brook Land Is Mine

So right now we're running around throwing clothes into suitcases, getting on conference calls, watching the world wide web be not so worldly or wide out here on the stormy Oregon coast, trying to get out of here and get to South America for a few weeks of Spring. And yet what keeps hitting the back of my mind like an insistent lover is...Brooklyn. In the last few months friends and strangers and coffee baristas have brought up that bucolic borough again and again. In fact someone who reads this blog - that's right reader, we may be up to a grand total of 25, and not all friends and relatives! - wrote from out of the blue, the prettiest email, the sweetest words, all from that distant land called Brooklyn. And it threw me back to last year, when we were back with Fincher shooting the Stand Up To Cancer work, and Rick and I ran over to Brooklyn for a breakfast that turned into lunch and then some because we just couldn't bare to leave. Someone we used to know at Wieden said that Brooklyn's like Portland, but that just proves he's been gone too fucking long. It's nothing like at all. It can't be copied or counterfeited. It can't be recreated out here in our new Western lands because there's something so inherent and in-grown and deep rooted there. We just don't have that. We have other marvelous and inescapable things but not that.

And while we were there we went to The Five Leaves (go there, now!) and sat at the counter and had the best freaking cup of coffee, okay, four (hello Carlos!) with beans that actually were roasted in Eugene, Oregon, a few hours from what we natives fondly do call Stumptown. Carlos was lovely and kind and irrepressible. The homemade ricotta with honey was delirious and moreish. Everyone told us to go down to Spoonbill & Sugartown for books and we did and of course Rick had to bodily drag me from the place, banshee-like, but not before the owners had exhausted themselves looking for the newest Paris Review and not before they had won my bookish heart forever. I want to go to there again. I want to go to there now. But first, we'll go to Buenos Aires and meet up with my great vagabond-poet nephew and spend three glorious weeks on the south side of the globe. As usual, Charlotte will write superior blogs with beautiful illustrations and extraordinary thoughts and I'll be drunk somewhere, trying to make a point I deeply, albeit slurringly, believe in. Let's end with W. Whitman of course:

What is it, then, between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not - distance avails not, and place avails not.

- Janet