As Sad as You Want to Be

Tarrant's is a half a mile from my house, but we went the long way, the three mile way.

A good friend had suggested a walk and an early lunch, so she came to Jackson Ward and we began walking east. At her request, our first stop was Lift because she badly needed coffee.

"You totally dissed me Saturday night," the counter girl said to me the moment she saw me. What? When? Seems she'd been waving madly to me at the Firehouse show Saturday and I never even saw her. I pleaded myopia and smiled as sincerely as I could. Honestly, never saw her.

Rock god Prabir (minus the Goldrush) walked up to the counter behind us, jarring my memory. "I had a dream about you last night," I blurted out. He shrugged nonchalantly.

"He hears that so often, it's no big deal," my friend pointed out. He wasn't a major part of the dream, but you'd have thought he could have been a tad more surprised to hear he'd made mine. Nope (yawn). Just another day for Prabir.

Life-giving coffee in hand, my friend and I headed down Broad Street, passing all the school buses in front of the Empire Theater for "Honk," passing the many buildings being rehabbed into apartments and condos, passing the colorful crowds waiting for buses.

She was enjoying every minute of our discovery mission, not having walked this stretch of Broad in years. We paused at the National box office to peruse the schedule, but nothing caught her eye. Eventually, we crossed over to Grace Street for a change of scenery.

We marveled at the Honey Shop (how long has that place been there?), peered in the windows of Jason Alley's new venture, Pasture, abuzz with construction activity, and admired hats at Chic Chapeaux. She showed me her favorite empty storefronts and I showed her mine.

Eventually we were almost back to Belvidere and and definitely in "early lunch" range, so we backtracked to Tarrant's for salads. They really do have an impressive selection of interesting salad choices. And a table next to a sunny window is a delightful thing.

The Cobb salad spoke to her and I got the Pear and Goat Cheese salad, a filling bowl of those two plus strawberries, grapes, cucumbers, tomatoes, mixed greens, and candied walnuts in a creamy sesame dressing. Since it had only been two hours since breakfast for me, it was astonishing that I ate as much of it as I did (98%).

Walking back, we made an art stop at Quirk Gallery to check out Shelly Klein's whimsical paintings on white canvasses. Her new show, "There's No Free Lunch." explores themes of sadness and forgetting the negatives that underpin happiness, about caring too much or not enough, about the sadness connected to the things that make us happy.

Frankly, when I'm walking, talking and eating with a close friend, sadness is the furthest thing from my mind. Without so much as an inward glance, I prefer to enjoy experiences as they happen.

Sorry, Shelly, but there just may be a free lunch, figuratively speaking, as long as you stay in the moment.