I Grew Up In Portland, And I’m Done Hating On It
It’s easier to dislike something than to really miss it.
(A note: this piece was originally written in January of 2020, pre-pandemic. The sentiment remains.)
First, two brief anecdotes, separated in time by twelve years.
2004: I lived in Portland, but I was about to leave to go to college. I was going to go to college with my high school boyfriend, Ben. We’d bonded over a lot of things: an interest in making top ten lists; an allegiance to Homestar Runner; an earnest love of several shitty emo bands no one’s ever heard of. And also, we’d bonded over our mutual love of the city in which we were both born and raised: Portland, Oregon. While traveling out of town (I have no memory of where), Ben sent me an email, which has long been lost to time. But I remember this line: “I love that I can tell you that this is the second best city in the world, and know that I don’t have to tell you what the first best one is.”
2016: Working at the newspaper at my grad school, I wrote an article called “Why ‘Portlandia’ Had To Die.” In it, I mourned not the loss of the television series, but the loss of a city I once knew: “The Portland I knew faded into something with fewer hippie old ladies and decidedly more plaid,” I wrote. At parties, when I told people I was…
