Moleskine notes, 20 June 2009

10:30 a.m. -- Blogged late last night and blogged again early this morning. Ate oatmeal with a spoonful of honey and a cup of hot Irish breakfast tea. Found lapidary shop in Chattanooga through Google search. Stopped at Wisescrappers for my wife to buy scrapbook material. Will stop at Blue Willow Cafe in Scottsboro for lunch and then drive to Chattanooga to meet lapidary shop owner at his home (7621 Cecelia Drive).

Editing new book, plot: creation, waking up, self-discovery and consciousness of online entity revealed via blog entries, with technical details of online person creation as seen from the perspective of the person whose identity is being stolen and a third mysterious person who may or may not be trying to change human history through accelerated genetic evolution.

13:05 -- Met a middle-aged man and his daughter at Blue Willow, both living in Memphis, a few blocks from the corner of Kirby and Poplar. He's a judge in BBQ cooking contests. She used to work at Steak&Ale restaurant, slim body with smarmy attitude (why wasn't I in a better mood to flirt?). They had just been listening to Whad'Ya Know? ["Not much. You?"], a radio program my wife and I have listened to many times and seen performed live twice, once in Birmingham and once in Huntsville. The man and his daughter come to Scottsboro a few times a year to shop at Unclaimed Baggage - no bargains found this time. The man used to travel a lot. I gather that he has retired from active work.

Our hostess at Blue Willow, the co-owner Sandra, warms the room with her kind, funny and wonderfully strange-as-ever, feeling-as-if-you're-family personality - sometimes thinks she has "Alzheimer's...or is it part-timer's disease?" No, my dear sweet redheaded grandmother, it's oldtimer's disease!

Our two young servers gave us their nearly-undivided attention, including finding a special, extra-sweet glass of fruit tea for my wife. A shout-out to the cutie attending to my wife's thirst! My wife sampled the pork chop special (mm-mmm) while I ate her salivatory sides of beans and steamed cabbage. I took the healthy route and ate the vegetable wrap, letting my wife have my side dish, strawberry pretzel congealed salad (maybe they should call it concealed salad because I didn't see any salad on her plate). I stretched the dessert course as long as I could, swirling the blueberry cream pie around my tongue while making a tropical fish out of the "chenille" pipe cleaner napkin rings (with my fingers, not my tongue).

Meanwhile, the backdrop - the knickknacks and artwork - highlighted the chocolate beauties standing nearby, two lovely ladies who met my gaze but not what I had on the tip of my tongue: a welcoming hello.

13:15 -- My wife now shops at Unclaimed Baggage, looking for a silver chain while I sit here in the heat of the car (98 deg F) looking at a couple of guys in overalls chewing the fat at T&T Auto Body shop across the street. Local life on a Saturday afternoon.

And speaking of body shops, have I told you about the time we stayed at a B&B in Dahlonega, Georgia, USA, and related to a young Australian woman working at the inn the tale of a business owner, Ralph Petroff, and his automobile incident?

Ralph had flown down to Sydney to look at business opportunities. He hired an automobile and attempted to drive on the other side of the road - no problems, mate. Then he drove into an intersection and turned the wrong way, trading fenders with another automobile. Ralph jumped out of the car and told the other driver he'd take care of the situation (in order to prevent any negative press about his first visit to the land down under). He walked into the lobby of a nearby hotel and proclaimed loudly that he needed a body shop right away. When no one heard him, he shouted even louder that he needed help and wanted a body shop immediately. The concierge approached him and asked him the trouble. "I've just had a car accident and need to get a tow truck from a body shop to pick up the damaged cars." The concierge smiled slyly and said, "Mate, you don't need a body shop. A body shop's where the prostitutes hang out. What you need's a smash repair shop."

The young woman laughed and agreed about word usage problems. She then told us about the time she'd sat for an exam in a large auditorium-style classroom at North Georgia College. The exam answer sheet required the use of a pencil. When the woman needed to change one of her answers, she turned around and asked a male student if she could borrow his rubber. His face turned red. She then rephrased her statement and said, "You know, the rubber at the end of your pencil." The man laughed nervously and replied, "Oh, you mean my eraser" and handed her his pencil. The woman didn't know her mistake until her roommate told her later in the day that a rubber in American colloquialism was slang for a contraceptive. The woman felt too embarrassed to return to the classroom and sit near that young man again.

15:30 -- Sitting with John and Esther, the lapidary shopkeepers. John taught us the phrase, "Tall Girls Can Fight and Other Queer Things Can Do," a mnemonic for TGCFAOQTCD or Talc, Gypsum, Calcite, Fluorite, Apatite, Orthoclase, Quartz, Topaz, Corundum, Diamond; the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. We're learning other facts like hardness can be tested with a fingernail (approx. 2.5), copper penny from 1982 or earlier (approx. 3.5) and a pocket knife (approx. 5.5 to 6), in order to test the possible type of rock in your hand. Their son graduated from Michigan Tech as a computer programmer with a preference for the C language. John is a former mining engineer turned Unix expert who used to work for TVA and helped them find 30 million tons of "missing" coal; he supports Sun computer users now.

John and Esther helped us sort the stones we'd "mined" outside of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, USA, (at the Spruce Pine gem mine two weeks ago, we basically sifted through buckets of loose stone, dirt and sand that had been seeded with stones from around the world, most frequently finding stones from Brazil in our sluice sifters). John explained to us the method for shaping and polishing the stones using either a rotary or vibrating tumbler. We gave John a few stones for him to cut and then bought a two-barrel tumbler, model number 33B made by Lortone, along with an extra barrel and an assortment of polishing grits.

19:00 -- Back at the Blue Willow Cafe for dinner, drinking a glass of house Shiraz, splitting 16-ounce ribeye steak, fried potatoes (fries or chips) and house salad with my wife. Bought a container of bourbon butter to take home with us.

Didn't feel like talking much today and I don't know why. I smiled a lot and am only now beginning to warm up (wine has that effect).

The table next to us featured four new faces, two couples celebrating their wedding anniversaries, 22 years and 39 years. The younger couple, Greg Shine and his wife, had funny stories to tell and I'll relate one to you.

Twelve years ago, Greg and his wife drove to an Alabama mountain village, Mentone, to eat dinner at Cragsmere Manna. They arrived at closing time and thought they'd arrived too late but the owners kept the kitchen staff around long enough for them to enjoy an anniversary dinner. Then a Filipino man started up a karaoke machine and began singing American pop songs in a heavy Filipino accent, entertaining just the two of them and encouraging them to dance. It felt to them like the evening had been planned for their anniversary celebration, an accident of fate.

The other couple, being older, told stories about earlier days. The man told about the time he'd convinced Greg to call in to a "partyline" radio program when someone had offered "fresh country eggs" for sale and ask what was the difference between country eggs and city eggs and what kind of chicken feed did it take to change a hen from a country egg layer to a city egg layer. The elder man also told me that the radio program still goes on (in my hometown, the local radio station had a similar program called "Swap and Shop") and asked me to listen to AM 1050 at 8:15 in the morning. He said his family used to own radio station WOAY in West Virginia. One of his relatives used to start up the radio station in the morning with, "This is WOAY, coming to you on 10,000 strands of barbed wire."

I heard a lot of stories today and saw a lot of pretty faces. I drove under a gorgeous blue sky and looked out upon the rolling green hills of northeastern Alabama, northwestern Georgia and southeastern Tennessee. I proved no theorems and tested no hypotheses. I was a human in the midst of humans, doing some listenin' and some talkin'. What else is there to do or be?