Anyone who ate at Edna’s this morning might find her behavior peculiar. She was explaining power consumption to one of those utility workers when she peeked toward the sculpture garden and gasped. She set a full pot of coffee in front of the workers, said “On the house,” then vanished back into the kitchen. A few minutes later, she emerged from the back door of the diner carrying a platter of root vegetables, a pile of mushrooms, and sandwiches, and took a rather roundabout stroll out to the sculpture garden, where she sat down the platter, then got distracted with tending some of the planted containers.
As there was nobody else there, she spoke with the plants for awhile before carrying the empty platter back into the diner.
This seems pretty mild compared to Saturday’s troubles. Probably just a bug going around.
Like most Saturday afternoons, the Council of Old Guys were on the bench outside of Stumpy’s reading their papers and puffing away on pipes and cigarettes. However, they were pretty talkative. Instead of their accustomed grumph, the were laughing and discussing the nature of knowledge and what it means to “Be.” This frightened a few folks, and Officer Patterson came to investigate. He noted that their pupils were extremely dilated, and asked them whether they had been smoking marijuana. He sampled their pipe tobacco, and determining that it seemed to be regular old tobacco, sat on the boardwalk with them discussing life, the Universe and Everything before wandering off toward Edna’s to “arrest some French Fries” that looked suspicious and might be found “guilty of being delicious.”
Edna says Patterson was acting “Like a goldamned fool.” and was worried that the stress of the job might be getting to him. Chief Wells came and gathered up Patterson, sending him home to rest. She then went to question the Council of Old Guys, but only found Buster still sitting on the bench, in a giggle fit over the Sunday funnypages. She gathered up their remaining tobacco and cigarette butts and told Buster to get some water and not to drive.
Ken showed up at the Museum later in evening, saying he had “Seen things! Brilliant Things!” and asked to access the JSTOR workstation for a few hours. I asked if him and the others were ok and he laughed. “Hoo boy, that was like college again, I’ll tell ya!” before launching into a bunch of Japanese biology journals that were unintelligible to the rest of us.
As for Edna, she’s been pretty quiet, though smiling a lot more than usual. When pressed, she has recounted some embarrasing story about that time the person asking her said a thing and how we all laughed at them. “Hoo Boy, those were the days, back when you were young and hadn’t learned to keep your mouth shut.”
