Cafe Everyday: Day 105
Melted cheese on my potatoes by special request, along with biscuits and gravy, because you can never have enough. Cranberry juice. Plain bagel with peanut butter. Coffee, life’s blood.
I took a sturdy white sheet of comic book backing board (shut up) and wrote on it with a sharpie marker, “HEY, YOU! YES, YOU. STOP FOR A SECOND.” I saw I was running out of room, so the COND in SECOND is kind of squished in order to fit, but it should still be readable from the street.
No reading this morning, barely any writing. I have to keep my eyes out for the prize. The waitress asked me what the sign was for, and I told her it was a joke between a friend that was too long to explain. She gave me a kind of screwed-up face that made me think she was assuming I was just being a jerk and didn’t want to let her in on my fun. I don’t suppose she was entirely wrong.
And I felt like a right jerk when it looked like it wasn’t going to be of any use, when my usual time for sightings had passed and I was getting closer to going home.
Only there she was, walking swiftly by, going in the same direction as I had seen her go on the first day, which made it seem like she would never look my way, it was just wrong because she wasn’t coming toward the way I was facing, I was staring at her back. Panicked, I reached up and pounded a fist on the window. The cook shouted, “Hey, cut that out!” from back in the kitchen, and I turned and shouted back, “All right! All right!”
When I turned back around and looked out the window, it took me a second to focus and actually accept what I was seeing. The woman had stopped. There she was. She was looking quizzically at me, and I held up the sign more affirmatively, to assert its message. “Yes, you!” I said out loud, stretching out the syllables dramatically to make it so a blind person could lip read my words through the glass and over the distance.
She laughed, wagged her finger, tapped her watch with the same finger, and then pointed down the street.
No time. Gotta go.
And so she went.
But whatever. Contact!
I took a sturdy white sheet of comic book backing board (shut up) and wrote on it with a sharpie marker, “HEY, YOU! YES, YOU. STOP FOR A SECOND.” I saw I was running out of room, so the COND in SECOND is kind of squished in order to fit, but it should still be readable from the street.
No reading this morning, barely any writing. I have to keep my eyes out for the prize. The waitress asked me what the sign was for, and I told her it was a joke between a friend that was too long to explain. She gave me a kind of screwed-up face that made me think she was assuming I was just being a jerk and didn’t want to let her in on my fun. I don’t suppose she was entirely wrong.
And I felt like a right jerk when it looked like it wasn’t going to be of any use, when my usual time for sightings had passed and I was getting closer to going home.
Only there she was, walking swiftly by, going in the same direction as I had seen her go on the first day, which made it seem like she would never look my way, it was just wrong because she wasn’t coming toward the way I was facing, I was staring at her back. Panicked, I reached up and pounded a fist on the window. The cook shouted, “Hey, cut that out!” from back in the kitchen, and I turned and shouted back, “All right! All right!”
When I turned back around and looked out the window, it took me a second to focus and actually accept what I was seeing. The woman had stopped. There she was. She was looking quizzically at me, and I held up the sign more affirmatively, to assert its message. “Yes, you!” I said out loud, stretching out the syllables dramatically to make it so a blind person could lip read my words through the glass and over the distance.
She laughed, wagged her finger, tapped her watch with the same finger, and then pointed down the street.
No time. Gotta go.
And so she went.
But whatever. Contact!