namaste cafe

Opal is older, and we went to Namaste Cafe to pay honor to our friend's entering a new year with many wonderful things on her horizon:  this summer, she will move from a small apartment in a divvied up house to a room in a communal house.  We also secretly believe this will be her year for a book getting accepted, though her gorgeous essay "Surge: An Oral Poetics" has been published in pamphlet form by Eohippus Labs.

This dinner:  coconut curry (spinach, vegetable, shrimp).  Chai tea.  Iced water.  Spiced potatoes.  Little birds in the bushes and the night slowly pulling up its cloak.  Lanterns.

I love the kind of dinner where the conversation spills and spills, keeps going until there's nothing left but more water and the patience of the waitstaff.  This is how life should be in the summertime:  sitting outdoors somewhere, perhaps with candles or a bonfire, talking to two women (or more, or with a little someone who slipped off to Boston recently) about complications and confusions:  the tattooed penis (the fear/fascination), the ways to process editors' suggestions on submissions, the readiness of pieces and manuscripts, the finding of homes, the rules for submitting (self-imposed and press-imposed), the terror of the underpayment of the child care profession, the politics of teaching in universities as adhoc, business plans and literary goals, the transferring of a summer garden to a new home.  All I could think, as I walked (ambled, waddled) to the car:  more please.