It’s part of my stomping ground, Canyon Market. And damned if I wasn’t stomping…or wheeling…through the place yesterday morning in search of a Saturday morning taster of frijoles when minor disaster struck. The place routinely offers customers samples on the small steel table near the exit. Of course, the table is small. Everything is small at Canyon Market, except my appetite. Because I can always conceive of stuff to eat, I can also conceive of stuff to buy. And on this particular date, the only practical thing to buy was milk for tea. So the real goal in going shopping was to get back into the mercantile swing of things. Not to mention getting back into Pacific Daylight Time. And, of course, for any native Californian, reconnecting with my indigenous roots, vis-à-vis refried beans. Canyon Market produces a cold version of the latter, a dip. And because fish gotta swim etc., frijoles gotta have tortilla chips, which they do. I grabbed one of the latter, stuck it in the bean dip and gouged out a healthy dose.

And to think that only one day before Jane and I were sitting with my cousin and his fiancée in a pleasant little café in the Paddington neighborhood of London. It was a warm night. We had an outside table. Cabs kept stopping right next to us and, for some strange reason, patrons kept emerging with dogs, which we petted. one by one. At a table behind us, a man dining alone talked to the women in the adjacent table about all the British television documentary awards he’d won. ‘So that’s good,’ he would observe occasionally. And that’s London. Surprisingly relaxed and low-key as well as self infatuated.

Whatever it is, it isn’t Canyon Market. Almost 6000 miles separate the two experiences. Which only begins to suggest the strange gulf that seems to have separated my mouth from bean dip. I had extracted a healthy dollop of frijoles hors d’oeuvre…then somehow lost track of it. I looked at my empty tortilla chip in alarm and disappointment. After getting into the travel mentality for several weeks, clean clothes becomes a major objective. Where was the gob of frijoles? Doubtless I had flung the stuff onto my crotch. No. Spared, but only temporarily. Because I could see a little glob of bean dip and see it clearly. The mashed beans had landed inside the plastic shopping basket on my lap.
In fact, the bean dip was currently oozing and dripping its way downward, descending the plastic weave of the basket…and heading for one of the openings in the bottom that would lead directly to my blue jeans.

What does a one-handed, travel-hardened person do? The angle was awkward. Wiping with a napkin…if one could be found…would only drive the dripping frijoles between the plastic basket’s spaces. I needed another idea. And the latter are pretty thin on the ground when you’re both jetlagged and recovering from a cold. So I did the only thing I could think of doing. I went back to the sample table, grabbed another tortilla chip and scraped inside the shopping basket. Voilà. Another tortilla chip laden with beans. The day was saved. I headed home for a nap.