I was standing in a store today, minding my own business, waiting for Sweetheart taking care of some questions, when a clerk walked up and asked if he could help me.
I smiled and said everything was fine I was just waiting.
He looked a little perplexed as to what I could be waiting for and asked again if there was anything I wanted.
I didn't want to bother anyone, that's why I stood at the store entrance, near a candy bowl (filled to the brim), not near any merchandise and was looking over framed photographs / portraits of essentially 60s icons on the wall. Nicely done. Picasso, Joan Baez, Martin Luther King, John & Yoko. Some full poster size, others of regular fare.
There's Jackie Robinson sliding into home plate.
At a loss the clerk saw my study and pointed to one of the photographs and asked, "Do you know who that is? Most don't."
I looked where he pointed — which happened to be the most familiar photograph in all the room for me, and said — "They don't know Samuel Beckett?"
Talk about silence.
ONION SOUP
Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, after a night of drinking in Paris
in the 1960s, ended up at Les Halles at 4 a.m. for onion soup. Pinter
fell asleep at the table, exhausted and suffering from stomach cramps.
He woke to find Beckett had scoured the town and come back with
bicarbonate of soda. "It was then I knew," Pinter wrote, "that this was
a man who understood everything about the human condition."
— from a most wonderful food lover's book of days
Life Is Meals (Knopf) by James and Kay Salter,
husband and wife team, amateur chefs, literary maestros.
Bad for them but good for me I found the book for 99 cents,
about brand new, fresh as bread.
( on with the show )
