Salad 1998 (these days are golden)

In 1998 I moved into the top floor of a house on a grassy lot overlooking I-5 in North Portland. There had been dogs in the apartment before it was mine, and it smelled noxious. Otherwise, the apartment was perfection. A bisected square. Four rooms with the staircase opening into the middle. Two windows on each wall.

In the first days I rented a carpet cleaner and washed the carpets four or five times. The next day, carpet still damp, I painted the walls of the living room barnyard red. It was a terrible, slap-dash paint job, but the color was good. Like, blood red. The apartment was sunny and bright. I bought yards of natural ivory-colored raw silk (charged, of course. I was crazy broke.) and nailed it to the window corners with little brads and let the ends fray. In that apartment was born Salad 1998:

• baby lettuces
• roasted red onions
• toasted walnuts that were dry and bitter, the skins of which often flaked off into the lettuce
• extravagant amounts of mild, snow-white chevre
• balsamic vinaigrette dressing that was strangely sweet and mild. I suspect now that it may have had more red wine vinegar than balsamic, though I never saw the recipe.

The ingredients of Salad 1998 came from the line at a restaurant where I worked.

At the end of my shifts, before the cooks broke down the line, I would pillage the little silver boxes of ingredients, filling a large plastic clamshell with my salad. I drove a classic car and I can remember its fumey, leathery smell. Driving home with one hand on the wheel and the other on the the plastic box of salad on the passenger seat. I remember the tinny creaky creaky creak sound of the clamshell rattling away. I remember the sound of the heavy, engraved buckle of the lap-belt clunking against the center console. I remember how the black leather passenger seat often looked: shiny, smeared with vinaigrette.

If there is any time and place to which I sometimes almost painfully long to return, it is this one. My little house. My wheels on the ground. My plastic boxes of salad. The tv I bought at the Salvation Army, that had a suitcase handle on top for easy carrying. The thunking dials of the tv. No remote control. No cable. No roommates.

One December night I moved the tv from my red living room into my bedroom and ate my salad in bed with my cat, who was dying. He was reeeeeaaaaaaaaallly old, and it was taking him days and days to give up the ghost. When I got home from work, he couldn't get up from his cozy spot on my pillow.  I wasn't sure what to do, so I moved my tv to my room and sat on the bed with him, watching the X-Files. It was our last night together. :/

I apologize for dive-bombing into such sad territory! This is what I mean to convey: when I think back on my salads, the big and small of life floods my memory.