Wednesday, June 17, 2009

words by paula drawing by larry


Larry said let’s go to Starbucks and you’ll write about someone we see and I’ll draw them. And I said, yeah like that loud guy we always see there talking to someone new every time, we can do him. Then we got there and sure enough he was there. But I don’t think he’s a bum.

One time we were sitting down with him and talking to him and our twelve year old son Jacob was with us and he was warning Jacob to always listen to his parents, us, because he knew. And Jacob was buying a new cell phone from earning money from shovelling snow and he was telling Jacob which guy to talk to in the Rogers for any problems he might have. And then he noticed my cell phone and said, oh yeah, the little chocolate bar, which is a good way to describe it, it’s very thin, and that he used to have the same one. Then he showed us the cell phone he has now and then the other cell phone he also has now.

So I was ordering Larry and me our coffees and he left his chair and was beside me telling me how there’s e-bay cards on the internet for seven hundred dollars, how he couldn’t believe they were for seven hundred dollars, then he showed me his Paul McCartney Starbucks card and said he looked it up and it was only worth one dollar. Which didn’t seem right to him.

I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. But I had to agree his Paul McCartney Starbucks card did look very nice. It was much more unique-looking than my Starbucks card. And feel sorry for Paul McCartney that his value was so low in whatever internet assessing plastic card world he was talking about.

But I didn’t ask him what he was talking about because I didn’t want to talk to him even though one time we had been sitting down together and the audiences of each other.

For once the pair of comfy soft purple chairs had become available – people were getting up and leaving them - and Larry grabbed them. What I said about their availability he responded to with more commentary.

I sneezed hard two times and he said bless you, you could tell it was bless you, but in a language I don’t know, it sounded like Yiddish, in his same loud voice that cut through the coffee shop and reverberated, two times too.