Today a young woman politely asked me why I was taking so many photos inside the small neighborhood delicatessen where she works here in Portland, Oregon. — The deli is called Flying Elephants and is near the condo Jim and I have rented for our vacation.
It was a fair question. I was in fact taking a rather large number of pictures inside her store. And sometimes I guess I do look disturbingly like an IRS agent — a trick all attorneys learn in law school, don’t you know.
Perhaps I should have told her that I came here from a place where real neighborhood delicatessens simply do not exist. And even if they did, walking to one in one’s own neighborhood would involve exhausting and impossible mental calculations.
After all, sane people in Tallahassee do not venture outdoors this time of the year without first calculating the ratio of heat against humidity. This is required in order to determine exactly how sweat-drenched they will become before the endeavor is complete. It is entirely possible in August on the Gulf Coast to lose your whole lunchtime caloric intake simply by sweating it away into vapor.
No, it is hard to explain the hardships of tropical life to someone who lives where the high temperature on August 3 was a mere 72 degrees — and with no humidity to speak of. I knew she would never, ever comprehend the concept of dying a torturous and agonizing death by drowning in one’s own sweat while walking to the neighborhood deli, if such a thing even existed.
So I gave her one quick glance and smiled. “I’m taking pictures,” I said, “because I’m a tourist from Florida.”
Robert Craig Waters 