Today at Logos

Sandy and I had an opportunity to chat today at the Changing of the Guard, and we celebrated the fact that Pennsylvania has become the 19th state to permit gay marriage.  I told Sandy that I had made, over the years, three wedding cakes for Ellen and Shelly, until the final marriage actually is irrevocable (we hope!).  She said she wished she had known me when she and her wife were married in San Francisco.

After Sandy left, I went looking for a Harlan Coben book to read, a follow-up to the audio book we read coming home from Santa Barbara, but couldn't find one, so I settled on "Sphinx" by Robin Cook.  It's been a long time since I've read a Robin Cook book.

My first noteworthy customer was an attractive girl who looked like she could have just stepped off the Riverdance stage.  She was wearing a forest green vest, a black velvet flared mini skirt with tights and "sturdy" shoes and she had auburn colored hair.  She spent her time looking through music and Literature books (as opposed to "Contemporary Fiction") and ultimately bought a James Joyce book.  How perfectly stereotypical is that?  She was with an older woman, who may have been her mother, who carried the younger girl's lunch box from some take-away place, and paid for her purchase.

A group of high school boys were laughing out of my sight and one of them popped in to check the fantasy section (which is near the front door), popping back out again when his friends caught up with him.

Tom, who had a round pinkish face and white hair in a "monk's cut" with a beard that ringed his face, wearing an orange plaid-looking shirt came in to see if he had left his monogrammed metal Starbucks coffee mug here (he hadn't), but he bought a book that was titled "The Maids" and the book jacket said "Faber" as the author, but I haven't been able to find either the book or the author on Amazon.

An SPCA lady said she had just seen something nice I'd posted on Facebook, and then commented that I usually post nice things.  We talked about her cats and Polly.

An elegantly dressed man with a handlebar moustache stopped at the bargain carts, then moved on. I noticed him mostly because he had his head bent at a 90 degree angle trying to read the book titles and it looked odd.

A Latino family (mom, dad and boy about 11) stopped outside talking to someone unseen.  The boy, like the high school boy earlier, also popped in, started reading a book from the humor bookcase then reluctantly put the book back down again when his parents were ready to move on.

There was a bit of David Copperfield going on with the next two customers.  A girl in white with a backpack was standing at the sci/fantasy bookcase.  I looked down briefly at my book and when I looked up again she had morphed into a large young man with a backpack, earbuds, a baseball cap and an iced drink.   When I looked up again, there was nobody there.

A French woman bought a copy of the "Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam" and was disappointed that she didn't get a discount on her $4 purchase because she is a friend of one of the other volunteers. 

Two girls came in with posters for "Cupcakes for Equality."  I thought it was a gay thing, but apparently this is immigration equality (and possibly for gay equality too).  Looks like an interesting event, but we won't be here so won't be able to attend.

Mr. Antiquity hit the jackpot today and was thrilled with a book of poems written by John Dryden, published in the 1800s and with print so teeny that I wonder what the visual acuity of people in previous generations was. I literally could read NOTHING without a magnifying glass. He bought it mostly for the etchings, which were very intricate and beautiful. He also had a pendant to show me, a portrait painted in the 1700s on milk glass that a friend of his had found in London. It's actually a lady's necklace, but he's wearing it like a watch fob, with the portraits going into his pocket and the gold chain hanging out.

The action this afternoon was slow, but steady.  I don't think there was any time when there wasn't at least one customer in the store, whether they all bought something or not.

A bra-less thin redhead in a mid-calf length spaghetti strap summer dress came in.  She had tattoos of daggers on each upper inner arm, identical size, about 1/3 the length of her bicep.  She sat down cross-legged in front of the literature section.  What looked like her girlfriend came in and talked with her for a bit and then went looking in other sections of the store.  She was wearing a shirt that had a logo of the Davis water tower on the front and said "Thoreau 3...SHHHH...it's quiet hours" across the back.

I thought my friend was not going to be in again this week, but he showed up around 5, saying he had been in Arizona visiting his brother and father. Apparently he had driven there because he drove through Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo on the way back home.  He bought three books today, two children's books and a book on the slide rule.  When I told him I never learned to use a slide rule, so he gave me a verbal lesson on the slide rule. 

While we were talking, an short old Italian guy, who is a regular, came in to buy a bargain book, so my friend left.  The Italian is someone I am always delighted to see.  He always has a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye and he looks like every day is an adventure for him. He had overheard us talking about driving along the coast and he talked about taking the train to LA and watching the coast all the way down.  An Indian girl joined our conversation saying that she was raised in LA and loves to take the train home to visit her parents.  She also added that she is graduating, after 4 years, this weekend and moving back to L.A.  She says she is going to miss Logos.

A Peace Lady came in.  She was wearing an amazing outfit.  A black overshirt with pink ribbons and smocking around the bottom and a big pink oval across her stomach which has "No War" appliqued on it.  She was wearing shocking pink dangling peace sign earrings and she had a big hat that I didn't get a good look at, but it was decorated with pink stuff and peace signs.  Somehow it made me think of a line from The Last Session where they talk about a "cute little pink little gun."

Susan's son came to relieve me and Walt arrived right on time at 6.  We went out to dinner at "Redrum Burgers" because it's next to the theater where we were seeing Hedda Gabler at 7, so had no time to go home to eat dinner. 

Redrum was formerly known as "Murder Burger" but when they started a second store in Rocklin, on the other side of Sacramento, people objected to the name Murder Burger.  They held a contest to see who could come up with the best name.  The nominations that had the biggest number of votes -- 1,500 out of 7,200 was "Murder Burger" (diehards didn't want to give up the name!), but the owners went with the second most popular choice, which was Redrum.  Four people submitted the name Redrum Burger on the first day of the contest.  A drawing was held among those entries to determine the winner.  The entry was received via e-mail and the winner had never been to the restaurant.  Nevertheless, he received $1,000 and one meal a day for the rest of his life.  Luckily for the owners, he ordered a peach shake when he collected his money and has not been seen again since.

Its menu features ostrich burger and bison burger, but we just had plain beef burgers.