2007-05-28 - 2:03 p.m.
Well, I was just hanging out at this sweet café on the Venice-Santa Monica border, where I usually have lunch a several times a week before reporting for work at the library. This time I was with my dear mother. And while we were slurping on our delicious Italian steak soup and olive bread, this long line of exceedingly distinguished middle aged citizens trooped in, as a unit.
Amelia, the kindly owner-chef of the diner, swooped out from behind the counter and started fussing over the group, showing them to the very best tables and making sure that their orders were just as they should be. Who were these VIPs that merited such special treatment? They were an elegant bunch, but clearly not showbiz types. Rather, they exuded genuine power, not the ersatz “buzz” of movie biz folks, which is usually what you see in West LA.
Amelia came over to our table at one point and whispered to us the identities of these VIPs. It turns out that they were every Judge who sits on a bench in the Santa Monica Courthouse! Power indeed. It was vividly clear why these folks merited special and dignified treatment. Why, they could, if they so chose, have ordered the closure of the café and sent every single person to the gallows or to be transported to Botany Bay.
One Judge, a decidedly good humored looking fellow with a shock of white, cast his eyes longingly over our bowl of Pasta Fagiole soup (with extra pancetta, ham, and proscutto).
“By the rights of Eminent Domain!” the Judge intoned. “I demand you give me that soup!”
We chuckled good naturedly as we turned to our soup.
“No, I am serious!” the Judge continued. “Bailiff! Confiscate that soup!”
All right, so maybe that last bit didn’t happen. But my mother and I found ourselves seated very near the group of judges, and decidedly pleasant company they were, too. They were not pompous at all – and they were also exceedingly welcoming. They sort of included us in their lunch time conversation about the appropriate plural term for a group of judges.
Hizzhonor, the Silver Fox seemed to think that the proper term was “a gaggle of judges.” But one of the lady judges, a middle aged woman with a shock of expensively tinted and coiffed blonde-ish hair, preferred to think of a “flock of Judges.”
The term a “murder of judges” popped into my head, but I didn’t let the gag pass my lips: Even when folks in power are being pleasant and cordial to one, there’s really a limit to how far you should take it. And that’s a lesson that was hard won in adulthood, I will tell you.
At one point during our conversation with the His Honor, The Silver Fox, the judge turned to us. “You see, when I was just a lawyer, starting out before the bar, my first assigning judge told me something that has always stuck in my head.” He continued, “He said, ‘If you want to be a judge, you need two things.’”
“What two things are those?” I asked, eyes a-gaping.
“Well,” the Judge smiled. “You need to have grey hair – and you need to have hemorrhoids.”
“I beg your pardon?” my mama queried.
The Justice continued to nod. “You need the silver hair to be distinguished. And you need the hemorrhoids to look concerned.”
There was not too much to say to that, I fear, and so we turned back to our respective lunches, all of us with a renewed respect for the state of American jurisprudence.
I, alas, have been sick as a dog this past weekend with an odious chest cold that I caught in the children’s library. It was my fault, though, of course, I can blame the revolting, dirty little beasts as much as I want. You see, it is a little known secret, but libraries are almost unbelievably filthy places.
Not only are there disgusting homeless filths crouched in every corner, smelling of urine and old garbage – but they’re also touching stuff, fondling books and magazines, licking the tables, and drooling all over the chairs. Everywhere you go is likely to be covered with a faint layer of organic filthiness.
And of all the filthy places in the library, the most filthy of all is the kids’ library. I mean, if you could see the piles of disgusting grossness that are deposited on every book, particularly children’s picture books.
The smudges! The smears of melted chocolate or burped up Gerber’s mashed carrots-and-peas dinners! The bloody ooze of skinned fingers – or, worse, the spots of spatter from baby vomit or infant diahorrea ejections – well, it would be enough to make you lose your dinner, I assure you.
I make it a serious point of order to wash my hands assiduously after every stack of kids books. Believe me, I wish I could carry a little bottle of water with me all the time so I could rinse off my hands after every book.
Anyway, as it happened, this Wednesday was the day I had to come in at something like 8 in the morning. And I have to confess that I was so tired and lazy I forgot my iron clad “wash your hands after every stack of books” rule. And it was no more than four hours when I suddenly started to notice a little tickle in the back of my throat. The tickle then turned into a raging ache – and the ache turned into a convulsive sneeze. The sneeze has henceforth moved into my chest, and now I am wheezing. Gasping. And howling with rage.
You see, children really are the worst thing. I mean, I now hate them doubly much. I always rather loathed kids, but since working at the library, where I have seen most of them in their most natural state, my dislike of the young rats has risen to near psychotic level. You would feel the same, I suspect!
I have become aware of this unusual breed of human – the pampered young mother. Who always comes to the library, dressed in exceedingly fashionable clothing, pushing her little infant in a pram in front of her. This odd species of woman then parks her prom in the Toddler’s Corner of the library and she wanders the aisles of the picture books, grabbing this volume of MONKEY SAYS HA HA! Or THE WITCHES’ SANDWICH. And then she shoves it back into the shelf in exactly the wrong place. Her excuse is clearly that she is so “busy” that she can’t be bothered to put things back in the right place. Oh, how I dislike her.
I am much more inclined to be amused by the freaks and the loons who come to visit me in the computer lounge. Just today, I found myself having a long conversation with this gentleman, African American, with corn rows and shaggy, dirty jeans. He insisted to me, and would take no rebuff, that whenever he logged onto Google, a mysterious voice was having a kind of conversation with him. He wanted to know just what if anything I could do to shut the voices off.
I, alas, told him that such questions were far above my pay grade. But I did suggest that if the Google voices talked to him again, he should ask them if they could get me a better job. And that really seems like the only way that I am likely to make my way in the world, really.
