I don't usually include pictures in my essays. There are several reasons for that:

1. I prefer to paint my pictures with words. This is the reason that I give and that I prefer to believe, and by and large, I'm sticking with it. More honestly, more significantly and more frequently, though:
2. A surprisingly large percentage of the pictures I don't paint with words are close-ups of my thumb.
3. A significant percentage of the remainder of the pictures I take are of the ground or the sky or my shoe.
4. I have but the most glancing acquaintance with the concept of lighting. Also, focus seems to me a somewhat alien concept.
5. Despite my working in technology, getting the pictures out of the camera or phone and onto my hard disk often results in my committing violence upon the phone, the computer or random passersby, several of whom have not subsequently sued my ass.

But this past weekend something rather serendipitous (which, to my great surprise, does not have a common etymology with the hair gel Dippity-Do) happened. HGG and I were in Portland, visiting Number Two Daughter, who is an intern at the Rock and Roll Camp For Girls, and we stayed at the more-than-slightly awesome Lion and Rose Bed and Breakfast, in the Old Irvington neighborhood. We'd gotten up early Sunday morning--something of a miracle all by itself--and were showered and ready and waiting for breakfast, when, casually glancing at the walking map of the neighborhood, I noticed a street name: Klickitat Street.

      If you just said, Aha, or some variant thereof (Oho, perhaps, or maybe Ehee) (okay, that was a stretch, unless you are doing Lamaze breathing), you and I are family.

      To be honest, it didn't come to me right away. It's been awhile since my kids were little and I read to them, and a good while longer since I was a kid myself, so it took a few seconds. I knew I knew the name of that street; I just didn't know where from.

      When it did come to me, I had to look it up on Google to be sure. I did have the vaguest of memories that Beverly Cleary, and her characters, were from Portland. Yup, there it was on Wikipedia: I was staying a few blocks from Beezus and Ramona's neighborhood. And for a few moments, I was utterly awash in what would be nostalgia, if I did nostalgia. I had devoured every book of Cleary's that I could find in the South Beach Elementary School library. I read them over and over again. They were one of the few truly unalloyedly wonderful things about my childhood. (Most all--perhaps all--of those things were in books.) "Oh, my god," I said aloud.

      HGG, thinking I was having a heart attack--and I was, just not the kind you need cardiac paddles for--rushed over, concerned, and I explained what I'd found. And also, further in the Wiki article, was the note that in Grant Park--just a mile or two from the Lion and Rose--were commemorative statues of Henry Huggins, Ribsy and Ramona. "We've got to go," I said, and HGG agreed. So half an hour before breakfast, we headed out to the car, and cruised around Portland's Grant Park, looking for the statues, which, after a little bumbling, we found.

      They're awesome. For once, in a life in which I've been lucky enough to dive on the Great Barrier Reef and circumnavigate Uluru, to take communion in Canterbury Cathedral and to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, and also to be strongly tempted to punch a dude dressed up as Goofy right in the face (god, I hate Disneyland), I wanted a picture. Apparently cell phones can do that nowadays. Who knew?

      Ramona is wearing her shiny red boots, her face shining with her fierce joy, undaunted by anything that life might bring her. Best of all, because she is fictional, she will always remain that way. This is her statue:

Here's Ramona's statue from another angle (sorry about the picture; I did warn you) (in my defense, the sun was behind the statue) (in my further defense, I suck at taking pictures):

And here is Ramona's plaque, quoting Ramona the Pest:

And then we drove up to Klickitat Street itself:

It looked...perfect. As if Ramona might--brashly, as she did--run out onto the sidewalk from this house:

As if Beezus might be lurking shyly inside, book in hand. I did see an old cat I thought could easily be Picky-Picky walk down the sidewalk and into the house.

HGG did her best to understand my suddenly taking leave of my senses in this way, as I hope you will. She does that, which is a lovely trait in a girlfriend. And a reader. So, for her and for you, and maybe for myself too, let me try to explain.

Imagine you are in a strange city, a place you've never been before, and--suddenly, without warning--you meet an old friend you hadn't thought about for years, and it's as if the years have melted away from both of you. You laugh, you talk as if you'd last seen each other yesterday. You come home, though you've never been in that city before.

For half an hour last Sunday morning on Klickitat Street, I came home. It wasn't nostalgia, because, as I mentioned, I don't do nostalgia; there is very little in the past that I feel homesick for, and I'd never been on Klickitat Street before. It was simply the sense that, however briefly, I'd stopped travelling and was at the still center of the turning universe. I'd found a place I belonged.

Then we got back in the car and went back to the B&B for breakfast, and an hour later drove back up to Seattle and caught our flight back to Chicago. I slept that night in my own bed, where, as always, I am ready to leave at a moment's notice. But for a little while that day, I'd come home.