By Neva Knott

Two days ago, a friend reminded me to write for an hour a day…this is what I have to say today…

Last night, we hosted a band, The Screamin’ Geezers, at my bar. Two of the members fronted long-ago-known Portland punk bands, The Confidentials and Sado-Nation (early 1980s). These bands played the early punk clubs here, 13th Precinct and then Satyricon, and helped establish the city’s still-burgeoning music scene. So the bar was filled with 50-somethings, all familiar, all the grown-up version of what I jokingly told my bartender was my “misspent youth.” It wasn’t, though…those years opened my creativity and gave me voice.

(So yesterday in my post I mentioned being an English teacher, but in the last few years, post 2008 recession, I’ve worked off and on as a bartender. In 2015, I quit my job teaching college to be with and after the cancer diagnosis take care of my partner, Andrew. After his death, I returned to bartending, actually buying my own bar, Black Dog Lounge).

When I first moved to Portland in 1980, I was afraid of the smells and bustle of the city, of the street people and beggars and crime. The one corner on Third and Burnside where the hookers stood. When we’d go down town to Saturday Market or out to dinner, I’d cling to my boyfriend’s arm, afraid that I would be accosted. I don’t know why. It wasn’t as if I’d never been in a gritty city: Dehli, London, Bangkok, Saigon. But for some reason, Portland made me afraid.

In the early 80s, I moved in from the suburbs and I began to love the city. I learned the quadrants that make up its organizational pattern, and lived in one easy to know. I loved the old man bars and the funky drugstore and the old groceries. There were fewer coffee shops then, but there was one just down the hill from my Vista apartment on 23rd, and I learned to drink espresso there. I became adept at city life.

As I began to know the city, I began to meet people in the music scene, some of them the same people who played and danced at my bar last night. There’s talk often of Satyricon closing, of our city changing, of our youth disappearing into age, but what I find as the subtext of those mutterings is the voice and heartbeat of community, of creativity, the rhythm and strum of the meaning in life.

There was a time I hated Portland, sometime in the mid-to-late 90s. It was as if a switch flipped, and one day I just had to get out. I think my social circle had fallen apart. I think that was about the time when hipsters as we now call them flooded in. I know it was the period when all of a sudden traffic was bad, things were expensive, and people started to seem rude. Recently, I began to reconnect with friends from my early, naive, frightened-yet-inquisitive days there, long ago in the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, and began to love my city once again.

Sometimes I think of that Neil Young song, “Helpless.” The line about “all my changes were there,” resonates. All of my changes have been in Portland. I found my adulthood here, I continue to find myself here.