Sybill

Alright. I'm now officially convinced that Subway is the greatest untapped resource of quirky exchanges and odd little bits of entertainment around.

Tonight I dropped in for a quick dinner. I ordered my sub and was met by the rather dour demeanor of the sandwich girl, who seemed, for all intents and purposes, to hate her job and to hate me for my role in it.

When it came to sauces, she asked me if I wanted regular or lite (I know, "lite" rather than "light", but that's what's on the bottle) mayo.

"I'll have lite," I replied, trying to be friendly. "I'll pretend I'm eating something healthy."

And suddenly the world shifted out of alignment.

A few moments later she said, and I quote: "When you said 'light', that was funny. The way you said it, almost like you had a pose, too."

Oooookay.

"Well," said I, "it's not like it'll make that big a difference, since the tuna's full of regular mayonnaise, anyway."

"Yeah," she said. "We mix the tuna with regular. Maybe we should make it with lite."

From there, she was complete Chatty Cathy. We discussed the non-functioning touchscreen on the cash register. The big blackout of '93. Hospitalization. And cookies. All in as long as it took for me to pay.

Odd... I still think the sentence, "When you said 'light', that was funny," delivered in a way as dry as a desert will stick in my head for a while.

Summer Reading Spectacular #20

Well, I finished one last book before the clock chimed the end of Labour Day. And no, I do not have a chiming clock.

A Crime in the Neighborhood by Susanne Berne is a sort of domestic drama set in the early seventies, telling the events of a pivotal summer in the narrator's life as a young girl when a neighbourhood boy was found murdered and the Watergate burglary was all over the news. It was a wonderful, if sometimes rather disturbing, book and earned the author the Orange Prize in 1999. I'd previously read and enjoyed one of her later books, A Perfect Arrangement another "behind the doors" drama.