WRITERS AT LITTLE PAT'S PLACE/OFFICE GREENS

Summer Solstice, 2008

Midyear Haiku:
Summer drizzle sings
through crisp roadside grass, whistles
strawberry moon tunes.

The Burien Senior Center Writers’ Workshop is officially on summer vacation - which doesn’t mean a heck of a lot since our only concession to the vacation spirit is that we meet one friday a month, not four - and instead of congregating at the Burien Community Center we meet up for breakfast at Little Pat’s Place on Ambaum.

There is a twenty year history behind our choice of vacation writer’s group venue. Until a few years ago when the original Senior Center on Ambaum was condemned by the city of Burien (the ceiling fell in one dark and stormy night), our Writers’ Workshop met at Little Pat’s every friday morning for breakfast before our 11 o’clock stroll across the street to a classroom we shared with the Senior Center computer lab.

Little Pat’s is a treasured example of that rapidly vanishing American institution, the neighborhood “greasy spoon”. The eats are plentiful and cheap, the colorful table cloths change theme with the seasons, Tabasco is served with every meal, and people not only know your name, they know that you like your eggs sunny side up, your teriyaki steak medium rare, and your coffee black (“Keep it coming!”). You won’t find free Wi-Fi, fancy vintage wine, or cloth napkins. You won’t need reservations but you might considering wearing your stretch jeans because you will be tempted to pig out. And you had better remember to bring cash because Little Pat’s is probably the last place on the planet not to take credit cards! (Which could be how they manage to charge less than $10 for a salmon supper with all the fixings.)

Pat and Nena Payoyo have been treating their customers like cherished family since they opened Little Pat’s back in 1974, five years after coming to the United States from the Philippines. Theirs is the classic success story of an immigrant family (most of whom help in the cafe) carving out an important place for itself in its adopted community - and, lest we forget sweeties, every one of us comes from a family that originated somewhere else! For all its faults, dear old America is rich beyond belief in the bountiful contributions of its varied populations - for sure Burien would have been poorer without the Payoyo family - poorer and hungrier!

OFFICE PLANT CARE TIP: Keeping the Office Green. I haven’t included a plant care tip for a few posts but there is an issue that came up this week I thought I would address - with the price of petrol in the stratosphere many of you are “calling it in”, working from home part of the week or shifting to the four-day work week - you are trimming your carbon footprint, lowering your operating costs etc., etc. Good for you!! Keep it up!

But don’t forget that your office plants did not volunteer for the program. Please arrange for the lights to be on eight hours a day even when there are no humans on site. Plants are living organisms and (unless they are mushrooms) they need light to live. Also, if you have a plant service make sure your plant care technician can easily access the plants - provide a key to your office, or leave one with someone who is sure to be around when you are gone (receptionist, facilities manager?). Plants locked in dark offices DIE! Quite rapidly too. Remember, healthy plants are vital to the “greening” of your office - they provide oxygen and clean the air of harmful pollutants. So keep them happy and you will have a happy office (when you finally decide to show up).

JUROR #3 READS “MANSFIELD PARK”

Week Two, June 2008

(Refer to previous post for lame explanation as to why I am reading Jane Austen.)

Jane Austen: William’s desire of seeing Fanny dance, made more than a momentary impression on his uncle. The hope of an opportunity, which Sir Thomas had then given, was not given to be thought of no more. He remained steadily inclined to gratify so amiable a feeling - to gratify anybody else who might wish to see Fanny dance, and to give pleasure to the young people in general; and having thought the matter over and taken his resolution in quiet independence, the result of it appeared the next morning at breakfast, when after recalling and commending what his nephew had said, he added, “I do not like, William, that you should leave Northamptonshire without this indulgence. It would give me pleasure to see you both dance.”

Juror #3: Kill me now!

Public Address System: The first group of jurors will be for Judge Palmer Robinson. Please note the name if you are called. Please refer to your bio forms as I call your names, marking the number I assign you in the large red block in the bottom right hand corner.

Jane Austen: Mrs. Norris had not another word to say. She saw decision in his looks, and her surprise and vexation required some minutes silence to be settled into composure. A ball at such a time!

Public Address: Judge Palmer Robinson’s jurors please follow the bailiff to floor eight and line up in numerical order in the elevator lobby.

Juror #3: There are forty of us. I wedge myself between juror #2 (Hiking boot woman who was reading a “History of the White Race” while munching a Snickers bar in the juror assembly room.) and juror #4 (Green flannel shirt man, late middle age, reading bio of Jessie James. I always notice what people read - speculate what it says about them - wonder if anyone has noticed I am reading Jane Austen. Wonder what it says about me.)

Also in the group: guy wearing U.S.M.C marksmanship t-shirt, gum chewing woman with iPod, blond woman wearing beads and carrying orange spangle bag - we are an eclectic group. I wonder who will be chosen to sit for this trial - wonder if I will be chosen - or if I want to be chosen. We hold our number cards to our chests, hearts thumping in anticip . . . ation, as the bailiff counts us off. Number 13 is missing. She pages number 13 and we wait standing in the marble elevator lobby like statuary in a mausoleum.

Jane Austen: As for the ball so near at hand, she had too many agitations and fears to have half the enjoyment in anticipation which she ought to have had, or must have been supposed to have, by the many young ladies looking forward to the same event in situations more at ease, but under circumstances of less novelty, less interest, less peculiar gratification than would be attributed to her.

Juror #3: Huh?? At length juror #13 is observed emerging from the stairwell, having walked up the eight floors. Health nut? Elevator phobic? We are never to know.

Bailiff: Please follow me, keeping in order. Jurors one through eight proceed into the courtroom and take your seats in the first row of the jury box.

Jane Austen: The ball began. It was rather honour than happiness to Fanny, for the first dance at least; her partner was in excellent spirits and tried to impart them to her, but she was a great deal too much frightened to have any enjoyment, till she could suppose herself no longer looked at.

Juror #3: Thus it went this week as I dog-paddled around the jury pool in Superior Court - sinking into a slough of ennui and frustration as the courtroom clock ticked off the hours of my civic duty. Two days of commuting into Seattle on the Metro bus, going through security, dozing slumped in uncomfortable jury room chairs hour after excruciating hour, swilling acidic coffee to keep awake while reading Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” - and wouldn’t you know the defendant cuts an eleventh hour plea, depriving me of my opportunity to exact revenge for cramped leg muscles and aching back! Believe me, whatever sentence the judge handed down is a walk in the park compared to what I would have argued for! That guy is lucky he bypassed the jury trial. Perhaps he was wise enough to have realized that after all the suffering inflicted upon the jury, “we the jury” would have been out for blood by the time we were at long last seated in the box. We wouldn’t have needed the three strikes law to throw away the key.

I appreciated that the judge thanked us profusely for our patience as she dismissed us - a full three hours before the first bus headed south into my neighborhood. A three hour layover! I’ve had shorter layovers on cheap coach flights across the continent. Had I driven my own vehicle I could have been home in fifteen minutes - as it was I had to kill three hours walking around downtown before I could even use my free bus pass. (And here’s a note: the schedule information on the Metro web site had me catching the #123 Commuter Express on a completely different street than the actual stop! I asked three drivers where the correct stop was before one of them pointed me back up the hill to 3rd Avenue.- across the street from the Courthouse! Hey Metro folks, if you want people to give up their cars and take the bus you will have to do a whole lot better job than that. By the time I found the bus stop I had shin splints so painful I could barely walk. No, I will not soon be counted among the fans of mass transit.)

Of course I could have spent twenty dollars for a taxis home but the County only pays jurors ten dollars per day. Good thing I am a public spirited citizen who considers jury duty a cherished right and privilege. Theoretically speaking. I wonder if Fanny came away from the ball with shin splints?

JUNE AND JANE

First Week of June, 2008

Jane Austen in Geekatopia

Guilty admission: this former English major never read Jane Austen. Years studying the Regency and Romantic writers and not once was I tempted to explore the reputed charms of dashing Mr. Darcy or mentally stroll the manicured gardens with winsome Emma. My reluctance might have had something to do with the fact that Annabella Milbank, Lord Byron’s unlamented Lady, was a Jane Austen fan. Well, if not a “fan” (The only thing Lady Byron was a fanatic about was bashing Lord Byron.) but she reputedly enjoyed reading Austen - clearly Jane was her kind of gal, all those posh balls, frilly gowns and girlish vapors. And being in her husband’s camp, I of course could not allow myself to fraternize with the enemy.

Recently when dramatizations of Austen’s novels were flooding prime time I gave the whole series a miss (past my bedtime, don’t you know.). But it got me thinking that perhaps my own pride and prejudice was preventing me from completing an otherwise well rounded education. So, I decided to get over it, suck up and dive into a volume of the complete novels of Jane Austen, promising myself I would not surface until I had read every one from start to finish! A nice little Summer read, thought I, until the book arrived from Amazon.com. The book is roughly the size of a microwave oven and weighs more than my corpulent cat. Summer not being a long enough season to do Miss Austen justice, I have therefore started reading while the rosy dogwood is still in first flush - otherwise the Christmas pudding would be fading into distant memory ere I reach “Northanger Abbey”.

Progress so far: have succeeded in conquering the slippery slopes of “Sense and Sensibility” and am now gamely grappling with “Pride and Prejudice”. Question: when do we get to something even remotely resembling what I think of as a PLOT? The breakneck pace of life in Geekatopia has obviously ruined me for sitting primly in a parlor listening to polite chitchat on the relative merits of possible dancing partners. I keep wanting to yell at the book “Who the heck cares???!!!” (or language to that effect).


That I am not settling comfortably into Jane’s world is my fault alone - dear Jane is doing her damnedest to be hospitable. Curiously I am right at home in Lord Byron’s Regency England yet have difficulties with Austen who was, though his elder, roughly a contemporary. Her “Sense and Sensibility” come out mere months before his lordship’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” hit the market (catapulting the poet into superstardom, I might add). Austen died the year after Byron left England for the last time.

No, I shouldn’t be having this much trouble fitting in - I think that what I am experiencing is a kind of culture shock. I am an independent 21st Century woman visiting a world where a woman, in order to survive, essentially sells herself to the highest bidder on the marriage market. No ready buyer before you are twenty-five? Sorry kid, you are doomed to dependence on married siblings or generous cousins - if you are lucky. Taking that into consideration I answer my earlier question of who cares about the relative merits possible dancing partners - EVERYONE, when the results of a sweaty spin around a ballroom floor might determine the entire course of your life - whether you will have children, whether you will have food, clothing, shelter, whether you will enjoy pleasant associations - or die like a dog in the gutter.

Poor old spinster Auntie Jane, left behind to paint watercolors and scribble novels! I have my own amusements - found myself composing silly ditties while I explored the landscapes of Austen’s mind. Forgive me for irreverence as I share a few of them with you:

No one Jane Austen knew
sported a tattoo.
Nor did any of the country house crowd
belch aloud.
No person rode to hounds
in distressed denim gown.
In gentle company it was not done
to text while chewing gum . . .

Well, it’s an ongoing composition of dubious merit - but fun. By the way, the photos on this week’s post were taken in Salisbury, England a few years ago - a wonderful town you should visit if you are in the neighborhood of Stonehenge. My English ancestors called that ‘hood home for thousands of years and when you see how lovely the countryside is you’ll understand why people settled there!