austin_dern (austin_dern) wrote,
austin_dern
austin_dern

It happened just the other day, it's getting kinda long

My Friday with bunny_hugger began, as was traditional, with a breakfast/lunch at a diner. This time we set off in a slightly different direction and got to a diner that I didn't know existed but that happens to be on the edge of a cute little inlet with all sorts of personal sailboats docked and waiting around in case someone wanted to go out somewhere.

We had an idea for what to do that evening --- there was a minor league baseball game starting at 7 pm. But even after omelettes and French toast there would still be quite some time before the game might start, and what would there be to do until then? Which is what was going through my mind as we got started off taking her to see my barber.

Actually, I got started off thinking we might go to a library branch and show where I go wandering around looking at books I really don't have room in the reading pile for. So we set off down the highway in my sincere belief that this intersected with another highway that would lead back to the most convenient nearby library branch, rather than go to the hassle of making a left turn out of the diner. You can imagine how hypothetical this intersection turned out to be, and soon we were getting pretty close to the Atlantic Ocean.

My barber has his shop in a place that's one or two little towns north of Asbury Park, and it seemed to me like this might be a legitimate thing to show off too. I didn't know where to look for evidence of Bruce Springsteen-related activity. (In hindsight, maybe 'E' Street would have been a good guess.) But we got to some of the many things on the shorefront being renovated all at once and saw the creepy smiling face of Tillie (or a reconstruction; I don't really follow them that closely), and from there drifted northward enough to see if my barber was in.

He was, although he was also at the end of his workday by the time we got there and still had customers left. He urged us to get a snack at the shop next door and he'd be over to see us when he was ready, but he was busier than he expected, and we were actually getting late enough we had to drive back to have a shot of catching the baseball game. The next time I went to get my hair cut, he wanted to know all about bunny_hugger, but was satisfied to establish that she was from Michigan, and Michigan is closer than Singapore, and then went back to his normal conversational routines apart from wishing me luck at the end of the haircut.

Trivia: Winston Churchill was an observer in the visitors gallery at the New York Stock Exchange the morning of the 24 October 1929 crash. Source: The Day The Bubble Burst: A Social History Of The Wall Street Crash of 1929, Gordon Thomas, Max Morgan-Witts.

Currently Reading: So You Want To Be A Wizard, Diane Duane. Yes, it is a lot of fun.

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