No Robin Hood

Today we sat in the window seats at Yin Yankee Café, eating a Panang Tofu noodle bowl and a tahini chicken wrap for lunch. A young man strode into view--clean cut, in a t-shirt and shorts. If anything, you’d have expected him to accessorize himself with a lacrosse stick, or maybe an iPod. But as he sat on the bench on the sidewalk in front of Yin Yankee, what he pulled out was a pipe. A regular old smoking pipe with a curvy stem, and a pipe cleaner to start things off. He sat on the bench, the whole time we ate lunch, casually puffing away while reading Moby Dick. He also had a Langenscheidt pocket dictionary. I recognized its yellow vinyl cover, and the way the center front edge of the white pages gets smudged to a dull gray with frequent use, just like my Langenscheidt French and Spanish dictionaries. So what language, I wondered, in addition to reading Moby Dick and smoking a pipe, might the kid be studying? When we left, I peeked over his shoulder. It was just an English dictionary.

As for Annapolis--Yin Yankee and everything else--it will be fine to just visit downtown for now. My urge to flee has subsided for the moment. I keep thinking of Olivia, as a toddler. Here is what would happen when she fell down and scraped her knee: She’d run shrieking in the opposite direction--away from the house, away from me or anyone else who might provide comfort. And I’m seeing myself in that vignette. Stress or pain=urge to flee. Run away from the dang bad thing, bad place, bad whatever it is. Maybe it doesn’t hurt over there. Funny--after 3 undergraduate schools and a couple decades of childrearing, you’d have thought I would have lost that impulse, but evidently I did not. Still, and fortunately, the itch has subsided and I’m able to view here as okay.

Drat. I’m ready to watch Robin Hood--the Errol Flynn version--and Netflix had to have it sent from Cleveland instead of locally. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be eccentric. It’ll be here Thursday.