"she looked like she likes you"

My brother David and his lovely brasileira bride Patricia visited me in Appalachia last night. They were in my part of the world to hunt for snow on Skyline Drive, and apparently they found it, along with two types of bear: a woolly bear caterpillar, and an actual adult black bear, both of which got photographed by David's ubiquitous iPhone.

David and Patricia got to my place around 6PM or so; before we were to go out for dinner, David had to poop and I'd had diarrhea all day long, so we both manned our porcelain battle stations (I live in a spacious, two-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom apartment, you'll recall) and let fly our salvos of ass-death while Patricia lounged in my living room, enjoying my furry carpet and thinking sleepy Brazilian thoughts.

We went out to a recent-but-belated discovery of mine: Foster's Grille, a burger chain that I've seen in both my town and the nearby town of Haymarket. Foster's has an interesting method for ordering food: you grab a long rectangular form that looks, from a distance, like the customs declaration forms that you fill out on an airplane when you're on final approach to a foreign destination. You write your name at the top, check off all the appropriate boxes, then hand your slips to the cashier, who asks you a final round of clarification questions before processing your order and ringing up the total.

The cashier that night was a young, sprightly girl, late teens or early twenties. She was very solicitous, and swept by our table several times to ask how everything was. Our meal was interrupted by my need to hit the restroom yet again; that was an interesting experience (I'll write about it later). When I lumbered over to get a final drink from the soda fountain, I found myself next to our server, who has busy cleaning the soda fountain counter. I marveled aloud that I had lived in town for two years but had never set foot inside a Foster's before now. She told me she'd been a townie for three years.

When I lumbered back over to our table, Patricia noted wryly that our server "looked like she likes you." Heh. I admitted I found the girl cute, but also noted she was really, really young-- I could have been her father.

"That doesn't matter," riposted Patricia (she and David are many years apart).

"Love doesn't ask why!" I jokingly declaimed.

And with that, we left Foster's Grille, my stomach aglow with warm food and with the tentative thought that some pretty young thing somewhere might have warm feelings for me.


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