The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse has strange things sitting about. I started staring at this toothpick holder the other day . . . and he has teeth! I think this fellow is what is known as an Anri figure – but I’m really not sure. I’ve seen him for a good part of my life; I guess I thought everyone had a little man with a big mouth who held toothpicks . . . but I just now realized about the teeth.
Yeah, yeah, these guys went and got mulch and put it out . . . but in the second picture, looking beyond the mulchers, you no longer see strings of white lights nestled in the bushes by the door. That is because of AmeliaJake and her nifty clippers.
Yesterday afternoon I pulled into Malcolm Court and looked up and saw the welcoming committee waiting on the balcony.
Sitting there in the camping chair is Arctos, Great Polar Bear of the North, resident emeritus of the Ohio Redoubt. After I got my stuff in, we hung out for a while and then he held down the fort while Der Bingle and I went to the mall and then on to Hot Head Burrito, where I got a burrito and a big nacho thing. I came home and ate the big nacho thing and didn’t have room for the burrito right then but have already had some bites this morning – and I am craving more, more and more.
Perhaps I should add a burrito line at the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse. Say, you know those 6-foot submarine sandwiches? I am imagining a 6-foot HHB burrito. But, wait, call in now and we can double it – 12 feet of taco meat and cheese and onions and rice and pinto beans and corn and tomatoes and sour cream.
I need to calm down.
East Noble went straight to closing. Straight . . . to . . . closing. And then I took Alison to work and stopped at the grocery on the way home, just because it was on the way home. Now I’m home and we’re all home because the school is closed.
The snow is blowing horizontally and it is supposed to continue.
I am wandering from thought to thought about possible things to do – not doing anything, mind you. Just moving from spot to spot in my goal-less mood. My mouth, however, wants to eat; I am not hungry, but my mouth wants to eat – turkey sandwiches. And I can’t eat them slowly; I gobble them down. Oh, I punned; it was accidental.
We had a two-hour delay this morning. Only the Noble County schools did, for some reason, and for a reason that totally eluded Summer only West Noble closed. Sydney and I had a two-hour delay getting to the fairgrounds this morning and it was still snowing when we were out there. Then we came home and watched The Blue Max because we turned on the TV and there it was and for some reason we felt like watching. So we did. James Mason was in it, but for some reason today we did not feel the wave of revulsion we usually feel when we see him.
Okay, a few days ago I WROTE a little post about heading back into The Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse . . . and I sort of got on my old theme of HOW I CANNOT STAND THAT MAN (JB) and then I clicked on a news page and saw that his mother had died at 92. I felt bad – not tacky and insensitive because I really didn’t know about her death, but groany kind of bad anyway. So, I still can’t stand that man, but I do regret the timing. Especially since I was going to write about going into the PBC&R and finding they had rented the place out for a Joe Biden Townhall Meeting sort of thing – I don’t know, something about needing to rev up the place since I had left them in the lurch. That would have been tacky. Elmer tried to help by suggesting we put black bunting around the I Can’t Stand Joe Biden poster, but I didn’t think that would cut it. Oops, did I fall a bit into my little scenario of Joe Biden and the cafe? I just sort of tripped a little, okay.
I suppose I need a moratorium. Thirty days?
My father used to tell me that a lot; no, he used to shake his head and say, “I tried and tried to teach you patience.” I just couldn’t catch on and with today’s technology, I find I am reminded of it often. Like today, when I am expecting a package and the store has provided me with a tracking number. I have pushed the link over and over again and now I am at the stage where I have to keep pressing my nose to the window.
| Location | Date | Local Time | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| WATERLOO, IN, US | 11/16/2009 | 11:00 A.M. | IN TRANSIT TO FINAL DESTINATION |
| 11/16/2009 | 7:28 A.M. | DESTINATION SCAN | |
| 11/16/2009 | 7:00 A.M. | DESTINATION SCAN | |
| WATERLOO, IN, US | 11/14/2009 | 7:00 A.M. | ARRIVAL SCAN |
| INDIANAPOLIS, IN, US | 11/14/2009 | 4:00 A.M. | DEPARTURE SCAN |
| 11/14/2009 | 12:19 A.M. | ARRIVAL SCAN | |
| LOUISVILLE, KY, US | 11/13/2009 | 9:25 P.M. | DEPARTURE SCAN |
| 11/13/2009 | 8:42 P.M. | ORIGIN SCAN | |
| US | 11/16/2009 | 7:54 A.M. | BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED |
Tracking results provided by UPS: 11/16/2009 11:28 A.M. ET
Der Bingle sent me this link to some videos of dogs welcoming their soldier owners who have just come home. Little Ann was like this – especially the first time he returned from a prolonged stay in San Diego. She jumped straight up to a level equal to his chest – all four feet, not just the front paws on him. I believe she felt she had jumped into Heaven. But, of course, this is Ann we are talking about, so she eventually remembered herself and looked around as if to say, “Oh, yes, he’s home; well, that’s good. And if anyone thinks they saw me up in the air, it was just a little accident with gravity.” Then she followed him everywhere .
A while back, I mentioned in a post that the patrons of the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse (and the Foo Bar) were distressed that I appeared to be ignoring them, going off in my own fugues and distractions. Heck, take my word for it; I’m not going to search and link to it. (Well, okay, I got curious and did just that.) Now, the opposite seems to be the case: I walk through the PBC&R and look in the door of the Foo Bar and everyone is in suspended animation. Lydia is at the piano, but her fingers are just above the keys; the checker game is forever at the same move and the special sarsaparilla keeps flowing out of the spigot but the glass never overflows. It’s weird . . . kind of like a Stephen King or Dean Koontz opening chapter.
HEY, YOU GUYS . . .PERK UP. I need you. There, I’ve said it. You folks are important to me. I need help, especially since a group of singing sisters (biological, not nuns) came to door asking for a place to perform and bunk and eat. They call themselves the SighClones and if I can get them all together at once, I’ll take a picture. (They were all here with me watching “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison” yesterday but I didn’t have my camera.)
So, guys, there’s a need for a real surefire cure . . . We need a party.
There is a good thing about being in my early sixties: I know Walter Cronkite’s voice the second I hear it. So if the television is playing in the background on the Military Channel or the History Channel International as it so often is, I am alerted that there is a good show coming on by the sound of his voice.
I stopped what I was doing this morning to watch a show that covered the time from the Japanese Attack on Port Arthur through WWII. Cronkite referred to the ‘unity and disciple” of the Japanese culture standing out among Asiatic groups. And that triggers a memory of a 60 Minutes episode about Japanese businessmen in training being required to stand on a busy street corner shouting out about mistakes they have made.
Generals came from all over to view how Japan had mastered the strategy of Western war and modern weapons. Nine years later, as Cronkite announced, they would be at war with each other.
Yes, I remember the Schlieffen Plan – the assumption the Russians would take six weeks to deploy and that France would fall in that time. I like hearing Cronkite explain it so much better than any history professor I have had. I remain fascinated by the first engagement of that August begun war: an airplane spotted Germans in Belgium and British Cavalry was sent in which was repelled by a German group traveling on bicycles. There were pictures – pictures of these young Germans – four abreast – pedaling along a road. Pictures of men on horses.
The Battle of Mons and the audio recording of a British soldier who won the Victoria Cross as he held the Germans off at the bridgehead long enough for the British Army to fall back. And I’m thinking of that man who had that voice – “He’s dead now, been for some time.” Cronkite is dead too, now . . . as are the 20,000 British who went “over the top” at the Somme and died in the very first hour.
And somewhere in the narrative I hear him mention that Napoleon had 20,000 shells at Waterloo; the British stocked up 3 million in preparation for the Somme.
Despite himself, there is pride in Cronkite’s voice as he speaks of Midway when the battle seemed going Japan’s way until “Thirty-six American planes spotted the Japanese fleet . . . On that day, Japan started to lose the war.”
The show went on and ended talking about the month and year of ’45; I was born in ’48. I saw the generations of the time from 1905 to 1045 through the lens of accomplishment without visible war wounds. The maimed were hidden away in Veteran’s Hospitals; we didn’t see them. We saw the prosperity and vitality of the GI’s turned students. For awhile America was still the America of small towns and girls still wearing skirts and Currier & Ives holidays. There was energy and church going and laden dinner tables smelling of roasts and turkeys and pies. Autos were big and heavy. Shoes were leather and high-tops until the were bronzed and made into bookends.
I went to college in the era of Western Civilization; within a decade, multi-culturalism would be re-witing the curriculum. Political correctness would discourage questions. Citizens of the world . . . but I think it might be a facade – that we are still leaning toward our tribes. And, quite frankly, I wonder about what was remarked upon over a century ago – that Japanese “unity and discipline”. I wonder, too, about just what the American spirit is now.
I guess I’m not being so political correct, mentioning something like this. But I see it; I think I do – in my electronics, in garages, in quality. I don’t think what I’m viewing is an optical illusion.