Real romance doesn’t come with a price tag

Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Before Starbucks was as commonplace as McDonald’s, there was this place in Seattle’s University District, on Brooklyn Avenue NE.

It’s all different now, of course.

The Last Exit on Brooklyn has been obliterated.

It was there in the 1970s, this coffeehouse with a piano and marble tables made from what were once dividers in a public restroom. People played chess there, and talked, and smoked a lot of cigarettes, and drank espresso before we’d ever heard of a decaf latte.

The Last Exit was the first place I ever saw a peanut butter sandwich on a menu. The peanut butter was there not as a trendy nod to homey food, but in service to near-broke students and street folks.

I was nearly broke, but didn’t feel that way on the morning of the best date ever. It wasn’t the most romantic or most momentous date. Just the best.

Recycling last weekend’s newspapers, I noticed that the advertising for Valentine’s Day stuff – that’s all it is, stuff – far outweighed news, sports, business and comics put together. It was creepy, like Christmas in October.

I don’t see what some heart-shaped pendant has to do with blossoming affection or undying love.

Judging by all those ads for junk jewelry, gaudy lingerie and chocolates that aren’t as nice as a plain old Hershey bar, one would think the ephemeral experience of love is as easily found as a parking space at Target.

So anyway, this date had its start a day or so before we wound up at the Last Exit. It was December 1976, finals week at the University of Washington.

I was walking through the UW quadrangle. On one of the crisscrossing paths between gargoyle-festooned buildings, I nearly crashed into someone from high school – someone special.

We’d been close enough that my mom had cooked him dinner. He’d stood up to my father on the subject of the Vietnam War.

As seniors in high school, we would drive on spring nights to the Spokane River. We’d sit on a riverbank and talk about getting out of that town. We’d pretend we weren’t afraid to leave.

At 18, we were close enough to spend hours and hours together, but not so close as to ever say why. We were shy, guarded, serious kids.

It was almost four years later when we bumped into each other and made this date. No one said it was a date; we called it coffee. Once exams were over, we’d meet on campus and walk to the Last Exit.

The morning came. We met up, took our walk, and settled in at one of the marble tables. I had sassafras tea, not coffee.

The Last Exit had its usual collection of customers. Late-night studiers, all-night drinkers, young and old people who fancied themselves intellectuals.

It was a fine place to talk about life.

You can only drink so much strange-tasting sassafras tea. Our date moved on, in the blue Karmann Ghia my friend had at the end of high school.

He took me to Seattle’s Discovery Park. Sunlight is what I still remember so well I can almost feel it. We sat overlooking the water. It was weirdly warm despite the sun’s December slant.

Like our riverbank talks in Spokane, there were long silences.

Between us was more than friendship and less than romance. Within the year he would move away, as he’d long said he would, to pursue a doctoral degree and an academic career back east.

He wasn’t the perfect guy for me. But the date was perfect. It unfolded as the loveliest surprise.

Tea and an afternoon in a park? Cynics would say he had no money. That’s not my memory. He never asked what I wanted to do, but the day felt deliberately planned. I loved it.

Thirty years later, ads for diamonds, dinners and elaborate Valentine schemes are unrelenting – as if you could spend your way into someone’s heart.

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.