My husband and I love to read in public. Sometimes we sit in a park quietly reading our books, other times we read aloud. Once we read aloud a short, hilarious play by Brigid Brophy, The Waste Disposal Unit, which was published in an old anthology of plays that the public library has so far neglected to discard.
Some of our reading-in-public dates are successful, others not. It was terribly windy today, but we bravely sat outside on a restaurant patio with our books.
I sat at a table under an umbrella while my husband dashed in and got the drinks. I was reading a pretty good novel by Mrs. Oliphant when a gust of wind lifted the napkins off the table. I chased them across the parking lot, because nobody, NOBODY, calls me a litterbug on Earth Day!
My inadvertent littering always involves a high wind. Once at a bus stop, the wind blew a kleenex out of my hand and an irritable man ordered me to “pick it up.”
I watched it sail across the street. “Why don’t you pick it up?”
This time I caught the napkins, though.
My husband finally ambled out to the patio with our drinks. The latte had such a pretty design in the foam that I hated to disturb it. Meanwhile, my husband was also reading a Victorian novel, something obscure by Trollope. But our reading-in-public date was interrupted by our love of gab. And since we were gabbing, not reading, we decided to go indoors and photograph people reading in public. But people were only reading the menu or the merch, the t-shirts with slogans and the travel mugs.
Then I suggested going to a nearby bookstore, plopping down in the chairs, and having a reading contest. Who could read the longest without chatting? I was pretty sure I would break first.
My husband hates the particular bookstore I mentioned: he hates the unfriendly staff, the entire absence of a backlist, and the uncomfortable straight-backed wooden chairs.
And he doesn’t trust their drinks. “Would you drink anything they make there?”
Well, it’s a blender, not a cauldron, but I realized that the OTHER bookstore has a better cafe anyway.
At the cafe, we did manage to read for half an hour and then triumphantly treated ourselves to a cookie. Did anybody win the contest? We decided it was a tie. Then we rode home against the wind, which seemed to be coming from the north, south, east, and west all at once. What a relief to get home and read our books, though it’s so cold with the thermostat at 60 that I had to put on an extra sweater, long underwear, and put another blanket on the bed..
But at least the wind didn’t blow away anything out of our bags on the way home. That antic only happens once a day.
Have a nice Earth Day!