Stolen Sweets

Omaha and I found dinner and the Portland Chophouse, which was expensive as all heck and worth every penny. Real meat, real alcohol (although the bartender was annoyingly light with the booze, and neither Omaha nor I felt much of a buzz from it). Simply by being there in the bar, we put pressure on the maitre'd to find us a seat and, instead of having to wait until our 10:00pm reservations, we were seated by 8:30. Excellent.

Later, we strayed by two of the Portland Jazz Festival venues. The first was with a band called Stolen Sweets, which was a trio of women singing, backed up by two guitars and a bass. The bassist looked like a bassist, big, tall, bearded, cool; the second guitar was an ordinary fellow, black hair, calm; the lead guitarist also their only male vocalist, was a blonde, close-cropped well-dressed young man who had the flare for looking both intense and cooly unperturbed at the same time. His patter, however, was very professional.

The three women were highly contrasted: the deepest voice and best range belonged to a bulky woman with Mediterranean features who was intensely, blatantly sexy and she knew it; the most precise voice belonged to an extremely skinny woman who had almost no emotional connection with the audience, her eyes wide and scattered with too much caffeine or something while she sang. When she was just talking, she seemed more human. It was the woman in the middle who carried a lot of the performance: short, muscular, beautifully comfortable in her body, and with the kind of face and eyes that expressed sly, sensuous understanding, the sort of face that said she would never be surprised by anything without thinking about it first. Her voice was just as fine-tuned. The three of them were just amazing together, and all in all they're a very professional, well-assembled band.

The other venue was some guy solo on a guitar, and he had no microphone presence whatsoever. I don't even remember who he was. He was terrible. We went back to our hotel room and went to bed.

Your Hero, At Your Service (Apparently)

So, after our my last post, Omaha and I went to the Portland Art Museum where I got a good look at the riches of German princes and princesses from the 15th through the 19th century. It was quite amazing to see all of the riches and how they accumulated until the German Hesse Principality was positively decadent. There were table settings-- several of them-- that took an average of 15 man years to put together each.

We went to a lovely little pizza joint after that and Omaha opened up her laptop and checked the train schedule; we were able to get a signal from the cafe across the street. We were right on time. We arrived at the train station and Omaha, whose feet had been killing her from the walk through the museum, sent me into the line to get the seating passes. The line was long and went around a kiosk inside the station, but it moved quickly. As it came around the kiosk, I looked up to see if I could get Omaha's attention. Instead, there was a crowd standing around where she had been sitting, all looking at the ground.

Oh, frack.

I leapt out of line. "Excuse me," I said, pushing my way through the crowd of gawkers. "Excuse me," I said, tapping the station master who was leaning over her, trying to keep her on her back. Really stupid. "Excuse me! That's my wife!"

"Do you know... are you a friend?" he asked, not hearing.

"I'm her husband," I said. I pushed someone else out of the way, tore off my jacket and dropped it next to her head as I knelt beside her. "Okay, sweetheart, shock position." I grabbed her by her belt and her shoulders and rolled her onto her side, then shoved my jacket on her head so she wouldn't bounce it on the marble. I hooked one hand over the knee that was not against the ground and pulled it forward so she couldn't roll onto her belly. This lets the drool and blood run out of her mouth without choking her. I ran my thumb over her lips and then wiped it on my pants. Bright red. "You really bit yourself this time, huh?"

"She bit me!" the station master said. "I was trying to keep her teeth apart."

"Old advice," I said as I check Omaha's throat for an elevated pulse. She was okay. I glanced at his hand: he wasn't bleeding. "Doctors recommend you don't do anything; you'll just make it worse and this way, if anyone gets bit, it's only one person, the victim. Update your first-aid procedures."

"Is she diabetic?" Someone asked. "I have glucose."

"Epileptic," I said. The paramedics showed up and started to ask the same questions, only slightly more technical. I rattled off her condition: partial-complex epilepsy with grand-mal seziures, the medications I could remember her taking, the last time she took them. "Does this happen often?" the fellow doing the paperwork asked.

"Not as much as it used to. This is the first time in almost a year. We should be entering the horse-breathing phase." Right on schedule she started heaving deep from her chest through the phlegm in her throat. The paramedic looked at me and said, "You seem to know what's happening."

"Yeah. This is normal."

After ten minutes, Omaha recovered just enough to walk. The paramedics didn't want her to leave, insisting she should be in a hospital, but then it no longer mattered. The train pulled out without us.

Damn.

I called the baby sitter, then checked with the Grayhound station across the street, leaving Omaha with the paramedics. Both she and they insisted she'd be fine and they'd be a while. There was a bus in an hour and a half. Fair enough. I walked back to the train station.

I tried to get the tickets for the train reimbursed. "It's still here," the station master said. "It just pulled forward to the fueling station. It'll be a while before its tanks are full."

The paramedics were really unhappy to let us go. "We think she should be in a hospital." Both Omaha and I shook our heads. We didn't have time, and they would just tell her she had had a seziure, pat her on the head to remind her to take her meds, and send her home-- and we were trying to do just that! In a panicked hurry while we loaded Omaha into a wheelchair she insisted she didn't need-- but she still couldn't sign the discharge paperwork properly-- we ran for the train, and we made it.

The only seats on the train were in the bar. Not too bad. But then the guy next to us had his wireless headset on and was talking to about a million people, loudly and obnoxiously, pointedly ignoring signs that said "For longer conversations, please use the vestibule so as not to disturb other passengers."

We finally got our seats, but they were in the back of the train, far away from the bar. Because we had had to carry our luggage with us, the conductor led Omaha to the chairs and I went afterward. As I walked through the train, three different women (they were all women, oddly) stopped and told me what a "wonderful young man" I was for helping that poor woman. When I explained that "that poor woman" was my wife, they all asked the same question: how long had we been married? When I said "eighteen years," they all seem surprised, but then said that I was still a wonderful husband.

When I got to our seats, Omaha said she had had a similar experience, but with a twist: we both looked too young to have been married 18 years. She also told them that this happened from time to time, and that I must be a "wonderful husband," to stick around for so long and be so calm and compassionate about the experience. "He's a real hero," one insisted. Another confessed, "At first I thought she was O.D.ing."

Hell, I just wanted to get onto my train, but there's no fighting nature. At least we've got seats and she can take her post-seziure nap, which she is doing with a vengance. Oddly, she insists her tongue doesn't hurt that badly.

Inappropriate, Wil Robinson!

To show how easily my brain is infected with strange and silly memes, I managed to work the phrase "a super-space-age miracle of science" into a Journal Entry. Not only that, but it came naturally and it fits perfectly in context. And I wrote 1900 words of a new story. It's just an idea, but it's probably completable without much trauma. I figure five to six thousand words. It's mostly a "setting" tale, and it shows one of the responses, a particularly protective one, that a culture of insanely long-lived people might have towards children.