Twenty-Seven Ladles

The Saturday Market was nearly impossible to navigate my way through. True, it’s always pretty crowded, but today it was insane. Needless to say, I couldn’t penetrate the flesh-barricade to make it to the inner Afghan food sanctum; I settled for food at the Dive Bar, the former site of a barbecue joint (which, though pretty good, wasn’t a real barbecue joint at all, but a Northwest White Boy’s idea of what barbecue might be—sanitized and so forth) and now a bar that seems mostly like a restaurant despite the fact that they only have a bar menu. They are also a brewery. Fresh beer is nice. I had two fresh beers. Honey-Orange Wheat Ale is not my usual style, but this was good. Light, fresh. There are a lot of windows in the Dive Bar, making it very non-dive-barrish. You can see. It was a pleasant time. I had barbecued chicken and a smashed potato salad. From my perch on the bar stool, I counted 27 ladles hanging from a fixture in the kitchen. I thought, “Gee, that’s a lot of ladles of varying sizes.” The sound system looked sophisticated. They played a 70s funk/disco mix as I ate my chicken and drank my beer. On the way out I stopped at the bookstore next door and thought about nepotism whilst thumbing through the latest issue of “Lyric.”

Twenty-seven ladles is a lot of ladles.