Always With Us

Today was my 73rd birthday (Happy Birthday, Judy!  Thanks so much!), and we went to lunch at Caffe Cappana, my favorite place to eat out here in Point Roberts.  Now, that's not like saying that Patout's was my favorite place to eat out in Los Angeles, of course.  The scale of choice here on the Point is pretty small, and two or three of the five possibilities are probably closed for the winter.  But even if there were more choice, I'd still like Cappana a lot.  It seems to me a quintessentially Point Roberts place.  Plain, kind of homespun in its acute casualness, but with interesting and funky art pieces here and there.  Currently a life-size, carved wooden figure with a Viking headdress, I think, stands at the counter.  That's the Vikings from the olden days, not from the sports world.

The servers and cookerladies (as my daughter used to call them some 48 years ago) all look to me as if they had grown up next door or down the block and came in to work when they aren't in high school.  They definitely don't look like big city girls.  And they are terrific bakers, as well, with wonderful ranges of muffins and rolls and soups.  And all that.  Anyway, I like it a lot.  And it's got wifi and you can use the computers in the back while you're there.

They've been trying to branch out a bit over recent times.  There were some fancy dinners with many wines, and evening live-entertainment, but mostly it is a coffee place where you could easily go to play chess with whomever was around from morning till late afternoon.  I don't think they have ever played music when I was there; the background kind of music.  And that seems to me a good thing, because you go there to eat and drink something tasty and to talk to whomever is around or whomever you came with.
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  Most recently, however, they are trying to lure people in on the weekend evenings with dinner and a movie, and in service of that they have installed a large monitor above the fireplace.  This is not a bad idea at all, I'd think, because now you can go and watch movies with whomever is around, as well.  Although peoples' tendencies to talk during movies would probably discourage me from enjoying this new service.  Better for me at home on my smaller monitor, but with no side conversations during the film.  So fussy.

Today was the first time I'd seen the monitor.  Unfortunately, it was playing CNN and since it was Sunday, it was talking heads CNN.  Fareed Zakariah's teeth had never before seemed so imposing.  The sound was off, so there wasn't a lot of distracting talk, but there were a lot of distracting pictures and words.  I am one of those people who are compelled to read words if they are placed before me.  I have had a birthday gift sitting in my living room for the past week which I finally had to cover with a cloth because it was wrapped in paper that said "Happy Hanukkah to You."  But the only part of the message I could see (it was a small package) said 'NUKKAHTO,' and I got so tired of reading that meaningless phrase, that I was obliged to cover it up.

So, here were these words constantly moving around on the monitor, getting bigger, then smaller, changing, then stabilizing.  And the scene required enormous multitasking even without hearing anything.  I haven't seen TV in years so I hadn't realized how complex it has become.  There's the interviewer in a box on the left, and in the middle box is the interviewee, and then there's a box with some photos of something happening, presumably what the two people are talking about, and then there's a crawl along the bottom about something that they are NOT talking about, or not yet, and there's a box that says what the next program is, and up at the top there are some other instructions.  YIKES!  This is way, way too much. 

Next time, I sit with my back to the TV, at the very least.  But better would be if they turned it off when the movie isn't on.  It felt more like being in a bar (albeit a very politically-oriented bar) than a coffee place.  It didn't feel at all like chess would be happening: who could concentrate?  And I kept losing the thread of the conversation with the people I had come with because of trying to keep up with all those words and pictures. 
I eventually figured out that most of the people there were oblivious to  the TV and what it was doing, what it was showing, what it was saying in words.  Maybe the purpose of watching TV is so that it doesn't annoy you when you run into it, because the TV, like the poor, we apparently always have with us nowadays.

Modern Commerce

We are not big restaurant goers; it’s a generational thing, I’d guess. But, I do tend to feel—as my parents felt about Chinese restaurants—that having a local Thai restaurant is another one of life’s inalienable rights: as in, ‘life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and a good, local Thai restaurant.’ Canadians may not feel that way so much because they may have had fewer Thais come to Canada after the Vietnam experience than came to the U.S. Or maybe Canadians just don’t feel they have an inalienable right to Thai food, given their more moderate national self-concept.

In any case, here on the southern end of the Sunshine Coast, we had no Thai restaurant until relatively recently. We had been meaning to go there for several months, but just didn’t get around to it. But the other night, after a long day of gardening and wall building, we decided to eat Thai. The restaurant is billed as ‘eat-in/take-out,’ and I thought a Thursday night shouldn’t be too busy, so off we went about 7 p.m. for a little Pad Thai. (Part of my relationship with Thai food is to try everybody’s Pad Thai; I eat other things, too, but that’s the starter for a Thai restaurant. If they can’t make great Pad Thai, they aren’t a Thai restaurant, in my view. I have eaten in Thailand, and it was the best food I’ve ever had while traveling, for day-in, day-out, indoor/street stall food. Which is to say, I really like Thai food, and I’m not much at cooking it myself.)

We pull up to a large parking lot with 3 cars that I thought might belong to the staff. Very slow night? Or a very bad sign about the Pad Thai? We enter though a door that has a big OPEN sign, only to find that the ‘eat-in’ option is actually a hallway with three tiny tables overlooking the parking lot. Each table is decorated with three chairs, and nobody is sitting at any of them. At the counter, a 20-something dude—the only person in sight other than us--looked at us as if we were going to ask him to help us change a tire.

‘Uh, uh….take out?’ he finally offered.
‘No, we'll eat-in,’ I said.
‘Well, the thing is,’ his turn, ‘we’re actually kind of busy tonight.’
‘Really?’ my turn, ‘You actually don’t look very busy.’
‘Well, yeah, but we’re busy with the take out. We have to make a lot of take-out tonight. The thing is, because of the take-out we couldn’t get any food for you until, oh, maybe 8:15’ (an hour from that moment).
‘The sign says OPEN, but you are actually not open, is that right?’
‘No, we’re open, but we’re really busy, so we can’t get food served.’
‘You’re a restaurant that can’t serve food, right?’
‘No, we’re just really busy, but yeah, we can’t serve any food right now.’
‘Is it like this all the time?’ inquired Ed.
‘Not usually, not usually, no, no’ stuttered the counter guy.
‘Look,’ I began a whole new topic for this guy. ‘We’re not going to stay and look at your parking lot for an hour so we can eat Thai food, OK?’
‘Right,’ said the counter guy.

So we drove off for some ordinary fish and chips plus a portabello burger (this is the Sunshine Coast, after all). I doubt that the Pad Thai was worth eating. I even doubt that they were cooking take-out back in the kitchen. But I really don’t want to know what they were actually doing.