Customers were from West Virginia, going back for holiday. Customer hated color grey, “my Least favorite color,” she said. Customer liked characters in movies who were scrappers, was why she liked Scarlett O’Hara. (Customer also liked the movie Imitation of Life.) Customer had just scored goal in pick up soccer game (Trash goal?) “No — good goal.”
Customer: You write in long hand? Attendant: you don’t? Customer: And then you put it on the computer? That’s amazing. No I don’t write longhand except for Christmas Cards and other notes… I suppose — with creative work… Attendant: Out of curiosity, how do you write? You do research and the paper kind of falls out of it? Or do you write first –? Customer: was there another way? Something stirs your interest, you look into it, then you write about what you’ve found.
Customer was L———e, her annual visit. Dropped that she had lived in London 19 years now (her evident love of London and Englishness.)
(Attendant at home watching his thawed brussels sprouts dropping like eyeballs among his searing tofu cubes. Attendant stirring the green balls among the white cubes, pan sizzling, and thinking he might add peanuts.)
Couple on couch leaning shoulder to shoulder on each other, to view a computer site together. Old man alone staring into space. A food truck I’d seen pass to the right in the morning I now see pass to the left in the evening. This reminds of the customer who came in on the way to work and has come in to relax now that he’s done. Bright white and yellow van passes from right. On way to work the next morning, I see the same bright white and yellow van pass. “It’s all very tedious until it gets sad.”
Young sensuous couple laughing/ gentling mocking someone’s attempt to parallel park across the street.
Attendant finds (non-homeless) customer who will fall asleep in the store asleep in a nearby city bench. Customer who’s homeless now, but wasn’t once, will come in to sleep for twenty minutes at a time.
Question — was there good and evil in history or just competing interests? Customer — FDR was pretty good and Stalin pretty evil.
Customer — there was insufficient bicycle parking in this area.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 