Milestones: Sitting at Bars
This is the view from the far southern end of the Matador bar on East Burnside, 6:37 pm Thursday night. It’s a wholly unremarkable, prosaic scene—but one I haven’t witnessed since Covid started.
The day before, Oregon’s Governor dropped all restrictions for mask-wearing and social distancing. We were, in other words, open for business. The Covid pandemic isn’t over, of course. Much of the state is woefully under-vaccinated. We will almost certainly have new restrictions in counties that begin to see spikes when unvaccinated people huddle around bars like this. But in Portland, on this Thursday, it sure felt like it.
Matador is a couple blocks from the house, and on weekdays it was easy enough to sidle up to this bar most anytime for a plate of nachos, a decent beer (Fort George City of Dreams is a permanent handle), and a Blazer or Red Sox game. We knew the servers who worked the bar pretty well and always caught up with them when we sat down. We don’t really love Matador, but we love the bar at Matador.
In terms of a marker of post-Covid normalcy, there’s nothing in my life that says it better than this bustling bar. I don’t know what comes next, but man oh man, it was nice for an evening.