I didn’t ever have a “strip” or anything before I came to Seattle. You know what I mean: somewhere where you could go to a coffeshop and a thrift store and a kind of scary record shop where the dude inside would laugh at you if you bought Toad The Wet Sprocket, or worse yet, Ten. When I lived at home, I went to The Grove a lot, as I believe I have mentioned. This was a little area right near Snooty Prep School, and it consisted of a big open air shopping center, basically, and lots of little shops full of very expensive clothes. You went there to “walk around the Grove.” Once when I was about fourteen I read an article in Seventeen (I was precocious!) about the Best Places To Cruise In The US, and the Grove was one of them, and I was so excited that I recognized stuff in the article. I was almost old enough to go to the Grove myself at that point, although I was at that stage where I’d have to be dropped off by my mom and met at the fountain at 10:30. (I can’t believe my mom actually did this now, considering it was a good half hour drive each way from our house).
You could go to Johnny Rockets and watch the waitresses dance on top of the tables to horrid oldies songs, or you could buy silver rings and tie-dye tee-shirts at the kiosks, or you could get frozen yogurt at TCBY, or you could take a rickshaw ride. The rickshaw ride guys were all very young and very very hot and they would tip the rickshaw up on its back wheels and run through all the cars on the streets, all of which would be honking as they just drove around. When I was in Miami for Christmas we all went to the Grove for dinner or something and the very very hot rickshaw ride guys were still there. Well, not the same ones, I’m guessing. And to this day I have never even actually taken a rickshaw ride, but I guess I’ll just have to add that to my already-quite-long-thank-you list of regrets.
But still, it wasn’t much of a college town, even though University Of Miami is right there (all the college kids were at some bar with Sailor in the name, and if you were cool you could try to get in on College Night when you were only seventeen like my friend Ashley did one time, and she saw our English teacher Mrs. Proenza there!). And the Grove was still a little too ritzy to be a real strip…I mean, I’m sure there are some baggy-panted kids spare-changing around there somewhere, but it’s more like very thin and fashionable girls popping into Banana Republic because their shorts are too short for regular underwear so they’ll just get a thong while they’re out. That kind of thing. You used to see Hare Krishnas around (holdover from when the Grove was Miami’s answer to The Counterculture) but there are currently many more cellphones than street performers.
College wasn’t really much better. I tell people I went to college “near LA”, but any person who is really from LA will tell you that that is in fact a bald-faced lie. I went to school in Claremont, which is a good hour from Hollywood, and whose signifying freeway is the lowly 10. I’m saying that we used to drive to Pasadena for fun. I’m saying that in the Village of Claremont all the restaurants had appetizers for ten dollars or more. It was surreal in many ways because if you had a car (which I didn’t at that time) you could drive for maybe a mile or a mile and a half and all of a sudden be in Pomona. how can I put this euphemistically? No Haagen-Dasz was sold in the supermarkets of Pomona, shall we say.
So in college I didn’t really have a strip, and you had to drive everywhere, and most people lived on campus while I was there, and that was about that. I went to the Village with my friend Anna every couple of weeks to deposit our tiny work-study paychecks, and my mom would occasionally take me out to dinner when she was visiting. But everything closed at five!
So, in August of 1999 I moved up to Seattle and was enrolled at the one and only U Dub. That’s right, kids, I was in the big time now, not only going to a real university where I had to have a student number (my college was so small that the registrar just knew my name and would comment on my classes when I went to register) but also that had a real college town. At least ten different places for coffee (most of them across the street or next door to one another), four record shops, four thrift stores that I can think of, five places for Thai food or pho, three art-house movie theaters…can you imagine how I felt? I felt so legitimate, like I was finally going to maybe be a little bit hip. I was so impressed to be living in a place that maybe didn’t have so many malls and where you could walk down the street wearing either many spiky protruberances OR jeans and a Gore-tex jacket and it would be okay. I felt like I was finally really in college (a couple years late).
Oh, and the bookstore! Well, first of all, as required by law, there are several used bookshops on The Ave…I forgot to tell you that’s what the strip is called, didn’t I. Yes. Official name: University Way. Legendary designation: The Ave. Anyway, there are several very nice and very reasonably priced used bookstores on the Ave, and as my finances get tighter and tighter I will no doubt be patronizing them more often. But The University Bookstore (or the U Bookstore! See, there’s even a cute little nickname for the school!) has and will always maintain a special place in my heart.
There are lots of reasons why: the beautiful art supply department, the chairs sprinkled lovingly around so that Chiara can sit and read cookbooks while she waits for her boyfriend to meet her, the free gift wrap and shipping anywhere in the US, the coffee cart right there in the lobby, the absolutely fabulous bargain book table, the two hours of validated parking, the amazing lecture and reading series (I could have seen David Sedaris, Sandra Tsing Loh, AND Jimmy Carter, had I got up off my butt in the past year). But the main and most important reason:
Patronage Refund, baby.
That’s right. The U Bookstore will write you a check at the end of the year for a certain percent of the amount of money you spend on books there. Isn’t that amazing! AND it includes textbooks, so you may not be surprised to hear that my refund this year was well over a hundred dollars. Well over. I am pretty sure that alums get the refund too, but I’m not absolutely certain. It’s going to be a sad day at my house if I can’t have that refund. But isn’t that so great? Aren’t you so jealous? I make it a point of personal pride to spend that cash on even more books.
Oh, and I forgot to say that the school of social work is right there on the Ave, and I can’t tell you how exciting it was those first couple of weeks meeting everyone and learning all the little restaurants. I usually bring my lunch to work now so I don’t get to eat out as much any more, but man! I have always been really glad that the school of social work building wasn’t on the main campus…being on the Ave is, you know, Closer To The People.
I have to go and eat dinner now, so I will just say this: I know that there are many cool cities and towns and neighborhoods out there in the world, and I know that for a lot of people having two bellydance stores right next to each other (and next to the Council Travel, which is next to STA travel) is not such a big deal. Come on out of the suburbs, those people may snicker. But for me, coming to Seattle and coming to the U and all of that was a gigantic decision and change for me, and somehow it has all crystallized into a couple of blocks. It’s always nice to have one’s metaphors so readily available like that. And when they happen to include the sausage joint right next to the superior hot chocolate offered by Cafe Solstice (and no other!), well, hey, you know you’ve found something good.