Simple Pleasures

"What would be fun?" I asked my shattered self, and then thought of stopping at the local bakery for  coffee and maybe a pecan roll, if they had one (these quickly sell out). I used to eat them weekly until they attached a label saying they are 670 calories apiece. So I now go a year between pecan rolls or until I can't stand the vicissitudes of life any longer.

I got there and they had one, and I also ordered a plain black coffee to be put in a "real cup," a.k.a. a ceramic cup. I once asked at a city coffeehouse to have coffee in a "real cup," and the waitress beneath her pink hair and piercings said, "We have imaginary cups too."

On every trip far from home I take a time-out to have a pastry and coffee of the local kind, and have very fond memories of a chocolate croissant and espresso at a sidewalk table in Quebec, and a light coffee with a custard pastry in a gilded coffee house in Portugal, and sitting with a coffee and pastry is always fun, a happy moment, even a peak experience, perhaps the most concentrated experience of contentment in the short time we live on this Titanic called the Earth. Come on, said my spirit. Hey, skinny one; hey, Cheerful Tearful. Enjoy it. Enjoy life.

Le Pic-Bois

Okay, I admit it, I wanted to escape the Missouri steam heat for a while, so I went to Quebec City, and there in the old town (Vieux Quebec; you must visit) what did I see on a shopfront but a three-foot wooden replica of my friend the Pileated Woodpecker delightfully translated into the delightful "Pic-Bois." That just means woodpecker, but it sounds so much cooler! In fact, just about everything was cooler in French. I admit too that I spoke bad French if only to say "Je ne comprendes pas" and "Je ne parle pas francais", and "Bon jour" and "Merci," and politely everyone I said it to switched to English except one seventyish man on a bicycle who saw me waiting for a bus in the rain, and stopped and said something, and I said "Je ne parle pas" and he didn't parle Anglais either, so he explained to me on his fingers that the bus would arrive in four minutes.

This huge wooden sculpture is strikingly accurate in every detail except the real Pic de Bois has much bigger and crustier black feet.

How wonderful that someone else a thousand miles away loves my close friends as much as I do!