by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2015/06/20 16:39 +00:00, original URI: http://www.siao2.com/2015/06/20/8770668856267196513.aspx
It has been part of my Twitter profile for years.
You can look it up if you like (@michkap).
This is entirely off any topic by the way. Feel free to ignore. Or not. Though if not then you'll have to do the work yourself. This is just one example.
I was in the Pioneer Square area. Just rolling around near there with someone kinda sorta special at the moment.
Maybe near Occidental Park, now that I think about it.
I was telling one of the less traditional and less appropriate stories about the founding of Seattle.
About how the place was basically rain and wind and lotsa trees and a sawmill.
But really that's no way to build a town.
Because men in general aren't going to live somewhere as miserable as rainy Seattle without women.
And not just prostitutes. Either locally or the more fancier ones they could find in San Francisco that they could blow a chunk of wages on while gambling in more conventional ways.. And probably losing money either way.
They want wives and mothers for a new town if there was ever going to be a town at all, in this rainy place, pre Microsoft and pre Amazon and pre Google and all.
So one of those founding fathers of Seattle funded a ship to go the East coast, where a bunch of women who were going to get married had found that they had lost their husbands to be because of the war.
The Civil War.
The boat (or probably more accurately the ship?) and her captain was charged with the quest of bringing 30-50 of those women from their broken himes/dreams all the way around the South American version of the Cape of Good Hope, to live a new set of lives/hopes in Seattle.
These women were boarded in a big dormitory until they got married, all at the behest of some of those very founding fathers - those Denny and Yesler types so often praised in Seattle town lore.
She stopped me at that point. She said I had to be making this up.
No, I insisted. This is part of our story. Part of our sawmill town mythology here in Seattle. Kinda romantic in a weird kinda way.
And at that very time in the plaques talking about the history of Seattle was a plaque that had been there for years, which briefly told the same story as I had just told!
You knew it was there, she insisted. But I denied it because I honestly had no idea. And she saw that the story on the plaque was different enough that it was obviously not what my story was based on.
My tale was based on several romantic retellings of the story that I had heard many years before.
She kissed me there by that plaque since I assume that I seemed much more romantic than the cynic I usually claimed to be.
Maybe she was right.
One thing that I do know is that it was a great moment. And a great kiss.
And that I really did used to have game.
Even though I am not (and wasn't at the time) playing much anymore....