Welcome to Seattle

Here’s a sad, sad thought: your cherished friend is visiting Seattle from across the country and you find out she’s drinking bad hotel coffee at her downtown hotel. You know the stuff: those packets that you stick in the toddler-sized coffeemaker, because you can’t bear to spend ten dollars on a cup from room service OR throw a coat over your pajamas and venture out for a to-go cup from the nearest café.

When I heard the news, I felt personally embarrassed on behalf of my hometown.

Vicky and I met forty years ago this month, when Wellesley College assigned us to live in the same room. She was from Ohio. I was from Seattle. We were both 17, on financial aid and not from New York or New England, which must be why Wellesley College matched us up.

Vicky remembers that I drew little cartoon evergreen trees on the whiteboard outside our dorm room because I was so homesick. She remembers that I brewed my own coffee, purchased at the gourmet store in town.

I remember that no one knew anything about Seattle, except for what they’d seen on Here Come the Brides, the TV show responsible for the song, “The Bluest Skies You’ve Ever Seen.” (“—are in Seattle?” Who wrote that?)

Over the many years since college, Vicky has been in Seattle briefly a few times. But on this visit, she finally had the leisure to look around a bit, while her husband attended a conference. I know Vicky to be an intrepid walker, so I thought we could start with a morning of urban hiking.

But first she needed a decent cup of coffee. And food. Now that everyone in the world can go to Starbuck’s, we locals have to get a little more creative. So we marched through downtown to the original Macrina Bakery in Belltown, where they serve perfect drip coffee in giant sloshing cups, along with the world’s best muffins and quiche and pastries.

Fueled up, we headed to the Olympic Sculpture Park: my favorite place to take out-of-town guests. To me, it’s where a lot of what makes Seattle Seattle converges: water, mountains, trees, art, kitschy history (The Space Needle), long-ago history (the bustle of tribal canoes and tall-masted ships), green history (the Sculpture Park was built on a former petroleum depot), and the ongoing conservation wars that define the West: the park crosses the same train tracks that carry coal bound for Asia. It is where I can show my college roommate what I missed when I showed up in that Wellesley dorm room.

Full disclosure: in 2007, my husband and I produced a documentary about the making of the Olympic Sculpture Park that was so positive a reviewer for the Seattle Weekly accused me of “documentarian Stockholm Syndrome,” as if I’d been kidnapped by and fallen in love with my subject: the Sculpture Park. Ouch! But that’s another Seattle quirk: our discomfort with boosterism. We fear it, because we’ve been taught all our lives that we’re provincial, we’re quaint, we’re not San Francisco or New Orleans, which are allowed to be both regionally flavorful and sophisticated. No, we prefer to joke about our shortcomings. To talk about how gray and rainy it is, instead of how gorgeous the weather can be in, say, September.

I confess to that reviewer that she was right: I was smitten with the park and therefore not very objective. I confess: then and now, I was and am un-hiply boosterish. I want people to love Seattle. I want them to see what a unique place it is. That’s why I don’t want them to drink awful hotel coffeemaker coffee.

And that’s why I’m glad the sky was blue when Vicky was here. Because when it is blue, it is about the bluest ever. Go ahead, accuse me of Stockholm syndrome. You know it’s true.

Thanks to everyone who attended the launch of Her Beautiful Brain at Elliott Bay Book Company. The room was full to the brim with warmth and support. And first reviews are in! From Shelf Awareness: “unflinching, tragic and compassionate.” And from Booklist: “candid, sometimes funny and always poignant.”