The Menu

Coming out of a downtown cafe this evening a few minutes  after 6, I passed a man holding a mobile phone and asking someone on the other end: "Do you have on your menu a macaroni and cheese dish?"

Evelyn of Sahara

At one o'clock this warm and sunny afternoon I walked home from the Saturday farmer's market at a shopping center's parking lot, where I bought fresh Italian pasta for $8 from an old tie-dyed hippie and a thick bunch of pesto for $1 from Cambodian farmers. A mile and a half, maybe two mile walk.  Crossing a commercial district I bought three heads of garlic for the pesto ($1.27) from a small Chinese grocery that's been there for ages and where I usually ventured in the past whenever I needed dried mushrooms for soup, and that's going out of business any day now, the owner doesn't know when, only that he's trying sell his stock.   The place consisting of two adjacent stores is for rent.

The street runs one block away parallel to the subway line, which at that point runs over ground, as the cities lacked political muscle to force it underground when it was built.  I passed hundreds of single family homes, a couple of small apartment buildings, a whole gamut of architectures, some very beautiful houses, front yards, most of them well taken care of, many with flowers and tropical flora, narrow straight street lined with cars on both sides, I crossed the borders of three cities, and while the street name, Evelyn Avenue, doesn't change, the numbering system probably does (I forgot to check.)

And during all this walk, which took altogether 45 minutes, I saw only one person in the front yard, his back to me, watering his plants.  A car or two passed me, in the distant a bicyclist rode on a cross street and a young man wearing a yarmulka, also at a cross street, was returning home from a temple. A desert in the middle of the day.  Luckily or wisely I had purchased a drink named Honest Tea at the shopping center's drugstore before starting the journey.  I'm finishing it now.

When I finally turned left from Evelyn to catch a shortcut, about where the subway submerges underground, and reached the path that travels along the tracks, a woman appeared behind me engaged in a conversation on her mobile phone, a person who wasn't quite there either.