Greetings from CrowTown y'all. I'm reminded this morning, as I've been sharing with friends, of Jim & Patty, valued Portland business owners who've shared many fun chapters with us, through their various enterprises. I often reminisce about All Y'All, the E Broadway smoked meats restaurant with southern cooking (ocra, catfish, stuff like that).
What might've triggered my most recent recollections, actually I'm sure of it, was having pointed out to me a property in the Pearl explicitly named Jim and Patty's by Jim and Patty. Well before that, they had shops all over town branded Coffee People, with clever marketing. Portlanders flocked to the place. We had one in our neighborhood here on Hawthorne. That property has since morphed into a series of excellent restaurants, another one on the way.
During a Wanderers meetup a long ways back, we got a report from one of those Shark Tank events wherein would be entrepreneurs would pitch their plans to would be venture capitalists (VCs), and we learned not just one of the business plans featured technology focused on seniors, improving life quality for older folks. For example: how to combat early onset senility, or any kind of senility? Proposal: pepper life with fun little puzzles, like if you wanna open this fridge, do this cryptogram in your head right now, or starve, only $10.99 a month.
So do I have onset issues at 67? It pays to remember we're all born extremely senile, although that's not the word for it. "Incompetent" would be considered mean also. So when I can't remember how a certain digit sequence maps to something so obvious as a touchtone phone keyboard, I forgive myself for being like that today, because I've always been like that. I'm no superman, let's restate the obvious for the record.
I'd say on average I've been doing pretty well for my age group, in many ways thanks to a generous donor, a good friend, who gifted me with that gym-quality elliptical, a device I've used for many hours in past chapters, as a loyal gym member who took advantage of my privileges. I'd started working out at Princeton, taking their gym class more out of curiosity than anything. I came as an alien, ready to sample what "Ivy League" was supposed to mean. Would their gym class be any different? I'd say the coaches were quite good. All I was doing was working out recreationally, no team sports, no rowing or anything like that. I had no time for such commitments.
Then I got into running, after my hallway-based guidance counselor, an older student, a university-recognized position, pointed out I was gaining weight at a somewhat alarming rate (this would be me in my early 20s, having been thin enough through high school). Thanks to Roberto, I was out the window (literally, not the door) onto the adjacent golf course, running with a pack. Princeton Inn has been drastically remodeled and renamed since then, although its overhaul is nothing, compared to what they did to the dinky station (the dinky being our affectionate name for a shuttle train out to the main Amtrak line, twixt New York and Philadelphia).
