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Natural Foods For Rent

Going up on a ladder in a closed up room and painting when you’re already feeling shaky is a Bad Idea.

Yesterday I wanted to finish up the last coat on the green room walls and ended up standing on the highest rung of the ladder, spilling paint all over the place, feeling shaky and not a little freaked out. I got down off of the ladder and went into the bathroom to wash the roller and brush and I guess the water must have woken Todd up — he’d been taking a nap — because he came upstairs and cuddled me and was sympathetic, he said it was probably the paint fumes. Since it’s winter the storm windows are already down, which means that with the door closed too (because of the cats) the paint fumes do get pretty bad.

Friday after I’d written my journal entry I went upstairs and started in on the green room, it’s white now with primer and we’d meant to buy pre-mixed gray but the gray is white after all. Ah well. When Todd got home we decided to go to an Indian restaurant that just recently opened downtown, so we drove down there.

When we first moved to this area, in the very first week we were here, two years ago, we decided to go to a restaurant that we’d seen in the phone book, they called themselves a “natural foods” restaurant. So we drove around trying to find it and couldn’t, finally we just stopped at a grocery store and called and asked for directions. It was in February, so the weather was really cold and snowy. The guy who answered the phone gave us directions and we drove downtown to the restaurant — in fact, come to think of it, that was the deciding factor in our deciding to be vegetarians. Todd hadn’t been sure if he wanted to because he didn’t feel like there was enough variety in a vegetarian’s diet (ironically, he has a zillion times more fun cooking vegetarian meals than he ever did cooking dead animals, and we eat a much wider variety of foods) and when we sat down to eat in this huge place — the ceilings are literally 25-30 feet high — Todd took one bite of his vegetarian chili and grinned at me and said, “Yes. Let’s stop eating meat. Tomorrow.”

We went there all the time, the people who owned it were huge sweethearts and it was one of the few places we could go in this area and hang out with liberal, open-minded people. One day we got the newsletter for a local group that does what it can to promote peace in Central American communities, and in the newsletter there was a small article about how the owner of this natural foods restaurant had died and how much she would be missed. About a month later we drove downtown to have dinner and there was a huge FOR RENT sign in the window of the restaurant. We were crushed.

So last night we were driving along that same street looking for the new Indian restaurant and instead of that same stupid sign that had been there forever, the “Natural Foods” sign had been painted out and it now says “The Green Cafe”! We parked and walked to the restaurant, and wow — not only has it been rented by people who wanted to open a restaurant, it’s been rented by this wonderfully interesting and kind family who are now running a largely vegetarian restaurant there. We had absolutely enormous dinners and talked to the owner for awhile about how long they’ve been open, etc. and asked if they had breakfast as well. She said that they did Sunday brunch, so we went again on Sunday morning. These people are so sweet and so lovely that it is almost like having an open invitation to come to someone’s house and eat whenever we want to.

© 1995 QN Podcast (formerly Quirky Nomads).