The Spokane Word

Your first impressions of Spokane really depend on where you open your eyes.

Getting off the freeway, the city is an aging downtown highlighted by newer civic structures and drive-thru lingerie coffee kiosks, but without the usual traffic and crowds of a city-center.

We soon arrived at our hotel, the Red Lion River Inn on the Spokane River, which gives a considerably different impression.

Our friend Pete Canfield had been asking us to visit his new home since he retired two years ago and moved there to be close to his family, so we decided we'd stop in while driving home from Big Sky.

It may have been 20 years ago today that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play, but it was 50 years ago that Pete moved into the corner house on my childhood block in Westminster.

I no longer remember exactly how it started, but we spent a lot of summer evenings sitting on the brick planter in front of his garage playing guitars.

"Scarborough Fair" was the song we attempted most often, but we never had Simon and Garfunkel looking over their shoulders worried we might best them at their own game.

That song embodied a romanticism we both shared in our coming-of-age contemplations of lovely teenaged girls we hoped to actually know one day before looking back upon them fondly.  That morphed into our second shared activity: trying to meet young ladies.

Girls were truly a mystery for me, but Pete was already quite experienced, or at least that's the impression he left with half-finished thoughts and innuendo.  He certainly had the ability to strike up conversations with damsels anywhere we encountered them, whether at the discount movie theater in Stanton or the beach along Naples Bay.

My dad's beauty salon in Belmont Shores was a short walk over a bridge from Naples Bay, which for adolescent boys seemed like paradise, with beautiful women stretched up and down the narrow strip of sand along the dark blue water.

Those summer trips to Naples became more regular when at age 14, my buddies and I decided baseball, basketball and football didn't hold nearly as much appeal as chasing girls, although to paraphrase another Westminster friend, Mike Rood, who joined me on similar pursuits as teens and with whom Julie and I had breakfast at Chace's Pancake Coral in Bellevue Washington the morning after we left Spokane, we were like dogs chasing a car.  We wouldn't know what to do if we actually caught one.

The summer of '69 was particularly memorable, because we somehow actually caught three: cousins Cheri, Cindy and Pam.

Once again, I can't remember exactly how we met, although apparently one of the corny lines Pete always tried against all odds somehow worked.  Soon, we were spending every day in Naples laughing in the water or playing paddle tennis with real live girls who truly liked us.

Occasionally, we'd splurge to rent kayaks for $1.50 or buy ice cream cones at the takeout window of the fast food joint by the bridge, but mostly it was just free fun available under the California sun.  Back then, the  Long Beach Recreation and Parks Department provided the paddle tennis equipment as well as games like Caroms and Chess to all comers.





That summer with Pam was about as close to teen-aged Summer Love in "Grease" as I ever experienced in my life, although Pam broke my heart before the end of summer, which was just as well because the girls lived in Long Beach's classy Bixby Knolls while we lived across the tracks in blue collar Westminster (okay, it was more like the other part of the freeway, but you know what I mean).




I find it all too easy to get lost in details of the past, so I'll just summarize a decade or so by saying that my friendship with Pete evolved to include poker, piers, poetry, Peugeot, pictures, pot, politics and penguins on top of the telly vision set.

While we've definitely lived our own uniquely different lives, through the years our paths have continued to cross, and we've remained friends for another 40 years beyond that youthful era.








While Julie relaxed at the riverside hotel pool with a novel, I headed to Pete's comfortable one bedroom house that he shares with his little dog, Jack Daniels.  After showing me around suburban north Spokane near his home, including the galleries where his photo art is displayed, the university district and the large brick house where he raised his family with his ex-wife who still lives there, I picked up Julie and brought her back to Pete's place.

He prepared a great roast beef dinner complete with mushrooms, mashed potatoes and asparagus that Julie and I thoroughly enjoyed before sitting around to discuss the state of the world.

The next morning following breakfast at local favorite Perkins, Pete took us to Manito Park in upscale south Spokane to see the incredible gardens there.



With all the beautiful houses nearby in upscale South Hill, we decided to drive around to check out the historic neighborhood of uniquely individual homes.  As Pete says, it's a long way from cookie cutter Southern California tracts.

We then headed back to our hotel and walked over to Riverfront Park, another lovely area.  We needed to hit the road for Bothell, Washington, because Julie had asked our nephew Jered to bring his mom to a restaurant so we could surprise her.  We bid farewell to Pete, who was off to take one of his granddaughters to a swimming pool.

We made it to Bothell at almost exactly the scheduled meeting time.  Jered did a great job getting Julie's sister Cheryl there, which wasn't easy because she has sort of a standing dinner date with her friend on Mondays.

We enjoyed delicious happy hour meals at Canyon's, an excellent restaurant selected by Jered, who blogs about the region's restaurants and nightclubs.  He proved his expertise to us with this choice.

 The two hour visit allowed us to catch up across the table rather than long distance, which was a nice treat.

While it was a rather brief visit, at least we remembered to take photos., which is more than I can say we did when we met our old friend Mike, who recently moved to Seattle, at breakfast the next morning.

After dinner with Cheryl and Jered in Bothell, Julie and I checked into another Red Lion Inn, this one a recently converted and refurbished SpringHill Suite.  It was still light outside, and having spent most of the day driving, we were ready for a walk.  As we walked randomly around the area, we saw bunnies among the industrial parks and a nature trail along a hidden creek.

We didn't get our money's worth out of either that spacious Red Lion Inn or another great room at Residence Inn in Rancho Cordova near Sacramento,  where we stopped to see another childhood friend, Chris Crabtree, and his wife Patty at their beautiful, sprawling Sacramento home the next morning.

They made a delicious breakfast of French toast with strawberries and sausage.  Once again, we failed to take pictures, which is really a shame because we very seldom get together.

It did take a lot of extra driving as well as hotels, but it was sure nice visiting with old friends and family.

As we made the long trek home after three days of driving, Julie said she was done with road trips, except the direct route to Big Sky, of course.  That's not to say she didn't enjoy the visits, too, but the stress of driving is much different from the ease of cruising.