Floating Above It

There is no end to how small a town this can seem.

It happens all the time - I see a gallerist or restaurant person in the grocery story and they're so out of context that it takes me a sec to place them.

How there's never more than a few degrees of separation between anyone in this town.

Case in point: I am meeting a friend at his house and while waiting for his girlfriend to show up, he puts on a cassette tape of a band he was in back in the late '90s.

I spot a familiar face. The woman singing in the band is someone I knew a lifetime ago.

Funny how that happens.

Once his beloved arrived, we strolled over to Pomegranate, a neighborhood restaurant for them but one they'd never been to.

I consider it essential to know about any restaurant that I can easily walk to and from. I was assisting them with research.

On the way, I spotted Bertha, a woman whose backyard had backed up to mine for the 13 years I lived on Floyd Avenue.

Bertha had been old when I'd moved there in 1993 and I knew she'd lost her husband of 70-some years just a couple of years ago.

But there she was, sitting on the porch of the house she'd moved to during WW II.

Even though I moved away eight years ago, she remembered me almost at once and hugged me, eager to chat.

It didn't take long for her to brag about being 93 (she doesn't look a day over 80) and I asked her point blank if she attributed part of her longevity to her long, happy marriage.

She did and admitted she still misses him every day. "I was lost without him," she said.

It was a kind of wonderful flashback talking to Bertha after so long. Our lives had been intertwined for over a dozen years.

She'd lent me her lawn mower before I had one (her husband always reminded me not to cut the lawn in flip-flops), taught me how to make squash fritters with the abundance she grew at the rear of my back yard and was, in general, the neighborhood busybody.

When my friends started ahem-ing to get me off her porch and walking to Pomegranate again, I hugged her goodbye.

"Come back again soon!" she admonished as I re-joined my dinner companions.

You know, I think I will. That's a woman with some great stories and I'd like to be the one to hear them.

When we got to the restaurant, every patio table was taken, but there was plenty of room in the main dining room which was suffering a wilting sonic attack from a group of  30-something women catching up on each other's lives.

Let's just say I heard the words "wedding" and "pregnancy" a lot.

We massed around the end of the bar so as to hear one another talk.

From bread served with salty high quality butter to salad to ravioli, blue fish two ways and twice fried quail over mashed potatoes, my friends were seduced by Pomegranate's food.

At one point, he compared her satisfied food moans to those of Meg Ryan in "When Harry Met Sally," high praise indeed.

The closer was Pomegranate's version of bananas foster and, for the chocoholics among us, chocolate pate with figs and berries.

When our server delivered the chocolate pate, he was quick to point out the locally grown Black Mission figs.

Took them off of somebody's tree, didn't you? I inquired.

"We totally did," he said quickly and honestly.

I'm just happy to eat figs; I don't worry much about whose tree they were plucked from. Call me old school.

The pate tasted as if it had been made with that same decadent high fact butter as we'd been slathering on bread, meaning the rooves of our mouths were soon slick with fat. Mmm.

Friend pointed out that the bananas foster didn't taste as if it had been lit (he's cocky because he'd made four of them in a night once), but was nonetheless exquisite in its rich banana creaminess.

By then, not only the patio had cleared out, but the final trio of the get-together threw in the towel and went home to their pre-fab lives.

We were the last. Walking home down Auburn, I pointed out that a block away, my father had been born.

That was a long time ago in a galaxy far away.

After my friends went home to their beds and early wake-up calls, I made one last stop at Cary Street Cafe to hear Fear of Music.

Josh Small did a couple of songs to finish out the opening set while I joined the people began pouring in.

Spotted a restaurant manager, a bartender, an editor, a banjo player and who knows who else among the expectant looking crowd.

Once the all-Talking Heads extravaganza began, it didn't take long for the room to become a mass of people dancing or at the very least, dancing in place.

All except three I saw, who inexplicably managed to remain stationary while some of the danciest music since Kool & the Gang (whom David Byrne once earnestly cited as the band's main inspiration) tried to wind its way into their body.

I don't understand. When you're hearing "Psycho Killer" or "And She Was" or "Drugs," the human body just wants to move.

Didn't we prove that back in the '70s?

A friend was charmed when a guy began filling the room with hundreds of bubbles raining down on the dancing masses, an effect I might have seen in a couple other decades.

She and I have been saying for ages that we were going to schedule a night out together and here we'd shown up for the same late show on a Tuesday night.

When the town's small enough, you don't even have to make plans. We're just not that big and it's kind of grand.

I'll say it loud and proud...I guess that this must be the place.