YES! The seed took root!

I had run out of frozen lunches to take to work and so had to resort to buying my lunch out. Considering (among other things) this huge car repair bill, I was most reluctant to spend the money, and so my first impulse was to stop at Subway, which offers the cheapest lunch I know near my work place, just over three bucks. But I really, really wanted a hamburger.

So I chose to go to the establishment next door, the Rainbow Rooster. This is the gay-owned restaurant I mentioned in my recent entry about a coworker's (I thought rather unfortunate) comments about how she never intended to visit it. And so it was with surprise and immense satisfaction that I saw her in there with another coworker, eating lunch.

I stopped by her table after my meal and asked her how she liked it. "Oh, very much," she said. "I had the meatloaf special, and it was really good. I couldn't even finish it."

"It was very good," chimed in the other woman with her.

"I tried it on your recommendation," went on she-who-must-not-be named. "And you were right. It's really a nice place. So big and open. We'll have to get other people to eat here, too."

I managed to restrain myself from pumping my fist in the air and giving a victory yell.

At least until I got out of the restaurant.

The Silmarillion at the Laundromat

Of all the places to read The Silmarillion, perhaps the neighborhood laundromat, where I went to wash the DEET out of our sleeping bags, is the most incongruous. It felt distinctly odd in that setting to be following the doom of Beren and Luthien and the death of Felagund ("I go now to my long rest in the timeless halls beyond the seas and the Mountains of Aman. It will be long ere I am seen among the Noldor again; and it may be that we shall not meet a second time in death or life, for the fates of our kindreds are apart. Farewell!"). The sound of the march of the grim iron-shod Orcs to the battle of Nirnaeth Arnoediad mingled uneasily with the rumble of the dryers. I looked up from my book, blinking in the flickering flourescent light and thought of the terrible oath of the sons of Fëanor, and the light of the Silmaril blazing through Beren's hand. I fed quarters to the dryer and thought of Barahir and Turgon, the fall of the hidden kingdoms, and the grim defiance of Húrin and how Morgoth wrecked his vengeance by making him watch the disastrous fate of his proud son Túrin.

Hispanic women with sloe eyes and black tattoos folded faded clothes and flipped them with practiced ease into the rattling rolling baskets. A drunk circled the machines like a ghost, and then flitted out into the night again, heading for the bar. No grim-eyed elves or fell warriors here, or so it seemed. Really, who knows which of these might be a hero? Can I know, any more than Thingol did when he scornfully dismissed Beren's suit for his daughter's hand?