Author: Jeff

A tall old man with a friendly face is sitting with six or seven other locals at a diner in Snoqualmie Falls. “Twin Peaks Pie” is listed on the dessert menu, though the diner from Twin Peaks is a few miles down the road in the next town. The man gets up as soon as everyone at the table has finished ordering and loads up a plate at the salad bar. The wrinkles on his face are deep and round, shaped by years of smiling.

A bit of conversation overheard at Elliot Bay Cafe: “She has problems with you because you’ve had affairs.” There are people having these conversations and this is as good a place as many to have them.

A pair of teenagers are hanging around on bicycles at a busy corner downtown. We maneuver around them and head up the sidewalk. Up ahead a young guy in jeans and a t-shirt is turned away from us talking to a chauffer about a square black sedan. They’re about to leave or they’ve just arrived. The kids with the bikes call out to the guy at the car, “Hey, man. Over here!” The conversation at the car is ending and the young guy says, “I’ll just be a second.” I catch a glimpse of his face for just a moment when he turns around to shake the kids’ hands. I recognize the face in the way you’d recognize someone who you’ve see around a lot but who you don’t know. My brain idly tries to match his face with a place. Does he live in my neighborhood? Is he a barista at Vivace? No, wait. He was Tommy on Third Rock From the Sun.

A woman keeps walking by the restaurant where Fiona and I are having lunch. She wears light and vibrant colors that match her pale complexion and faint red hair. Sometimes she passes by from the left and sometimes she passes from the right. Sometimes she’s pulling a cart filled with spiral bound notebooks; sometimes she carries nothing. She must have gone past a dozen times before we finished with lunch. Later, I’m spending a few minutes of quality time with a cup of tea on the sidewalk outside Bauhaus. The same girl strolls up to the corner, waits for the light to change, and crosses the street, where she climbs into a Volvo and drives away. And that’s it.

There’s a guy on a bicycle stopped at a red light. He has two long crutches balances across the handlebars. The light changes and he peddles into the intersection. He’s wearing a brace on his right foot.

I opened a CD case and found an extra CD doubled up with the CD that was meant to be there. It was a regular commercially manufactured music CD, but it had no title printed on the disc. I didn’t recognize the music. So with the help of CDDB I could identified the disc. Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci – a band that I’ve never heard of.

There’s a label on the underside of my computer monitor; I can see it reflected in the CD, which is now shiny side-up on my desk. I reach under the monitor and tear the sticker off. I read the words printed across it: “Warranty void if seal broken.” Oops.

There are some days where your canoe is capsized by a wave coming up from the wake of a giant powerboat, figuratively speaking. You’re dunked underwater and you manage to get the boat turned back over. You retrieve the paddles and what suddenly seems like an excessive amount of cargo for a brief spin in a rented boat. Metaphorically, some kind soul in a boat who’s crew has managed to remain above water will take the waterlogged valuables that you and your shipmate are holding over your head to shore for you while you try to tow the boat to shore. You’ll try to tug the boat toward shore, working your legs against the waves but not gaining any ground; and then your figurative shipmate will point out that the water is shallow enough for you to walk to shore.

There are other days where your rented canoe capsizes quite literally. I’ve calculated how long ago I earned the Canoeing Merit Badge from the Boy Scouts – I’ve had more birthdays since being awarded that badge than I had before I received it. I think my credentials have expired.

The University of Washington’s Waterfront Activities Center near Husky Stadium rents out canoes for $7.50 an hour. You can paddle out beneath little footbridges and freeway on-ramps. We saw sunbathing turtles, herons, and the usual ducks. Make sure you steer into the wakes of large boats so that they hit you at the bow and not the side.

Another photo of the traffic circle from the last shot appeared here a few weeks ago, when it was still intact.

Bonus Photo for Photo Friday: Shadows

In the course of cleaning my apartment I dug up:

• $1.54 in coins taped to the back of a postcard
  Fiona sent me the change that was left at the end of her 1997 U.S. trip. The words “emergency cheering up kit” are written on the back. If I remember correctly, Fiona advised me to buy candy bars with the money.

• $15 Canadian
  This is money left from the trip to Vancouver that Justin and I went on a couple of years ago.

• Assorted coins in discontinued European currencies and a British £1 coin.
  On my backpacking trip a few years ago, I kept all the leftover currency in a Zip-Lok bag tucked away in my backpack. At the end of the trip I had about $50 in paper currency. I couldn’t find any place that offered realistic exchange rates and ended up getting only $35 from Thomas Cook.

• A Royal Bank of Scotland £1 note
  It was change from a chain bookstore in Edinburgh I think. Taped to my refrigerator.

• 41 Czech Korunas in coins
  In Prague someone gave me a handful of 10 heller and 20 heller coins as change – worth less than one cent each. She looked apologetic and said that it was all she had. When I tried to use them elsewhere, no one would accept them as payment.

• Resting inside the hubcap from a Volkswagen: 130 pennies, a half-inch shred from the lower left-hand corner of a $1 bill, and the revolver from the board game Clue.
  The hubcap was left behind by Cory, my old roommate Joe’s old roommate, (or by one of Cory’s friends). The pennies just accumulated there as pennies do. Of the dollar bill fragment and the game piece, my memory is foggy at best. I couldn’t say with any confidence whether the two are related.

This morning – yesterday morning – I ate the handful of jelly beans that I had left, even though I was suffering a slight jelly bean binge induced hangover.

As spring progresses there will be fewer and fewer opportunities to describe the leaves on a tree as being just painted on.

A burnt-out floodlight has left the Space Needle with a gap-toothed smile.

I notice the group at the table right outside the window – a girl with long tight curls chatting with two guys. I get back into my book for awhile. When I look up again, the guys are there and the girl is gone. But I see her immediately. She’s trudging up the gravel hill at the far end of the little empty parking lot across the street. Behind her there’s the fence enclosing the freeway down at the bottom of a weedy hill (and there’s a postcard view of the Space Needle). She walks through the parking lot, carrying nothing, walking directly toward her friends. She veers left at the corner to cross the street, then turns again to rejoin her friends outside the coffee shop. She stands out there for a moment, then produces a digital camera from somewhere – brand new, a label advertising the camera’s features is still attached to the front. As soon as she’s snapped separate photos of her two friends, everyone gets up and walks briskly away.

Based on the forensic evidence I was able to determine that the WHACK! Thump. Sproinng! (thump.) (thump.) Clatter! that woke me up early this morning was caused by an orange falling from a shelf in the kitchen, hitting a spoon on the counter and launching it into the air, and rolling to a stop in the sink. Whether that chain of events was more comical than the way I clambered out of bed and wrestled a pair of pants on before going out to confront an unknown intruder depends on your perspective, I suppose. I ate the orange in the end.

My nephews are in their car seats in the back. Matthew asks Daniel a rather lofty sounding question. “Daniel, Do you know what infinity looks like?”

Daniel answers, “No.”

“Infinity is an eight squashed on its side.”

A minute later Daniel calls out to Rachel in the driver’s seat, “Mom?”

Rachel looks up at the rear view mirror, “Yes, Daniel?”

Daniel repeats Matthew’s question, “Do you know what infinity looks like?”

“What does it look like?”

Daniel starts, “Infinity is . . .”

Chris, the oldest, pipes in, “It’s an eight squashed on its side!”

Daniel isn’t bothered by the interruption. He just seems to have wanted to make sure that his mother knew.

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Matthew got a ring from the vending machine at Azteca. He wears it constantly in spite of how it turns his finger green, or more likely because of how it turns his finger green.