She was old but sharp and I knew she identified me yards before I even noticed her standing there. With a sweet smile and grey hair, she was the kind of woman just nutty enough to have 3 or 7 cats but sweet enough to make apologies for her behavior. She held her clipboard like it meant the world to her.
“Excuse me sir, do you speak Spanish?” she asked. “Not very well,” I replied, causing her to slow down on her list of pre-anticipated responses. Her pencil fumbled to find a new section, and once she did she began all over again as if I hit a secret reset button.
“Do you like hot dogs?”
In 30-something years I don’t think I’ve ever missed the opportunity for a smirk or off-colored response to that question; with this woman it didn’t seem appropriate. I said “But of course. Why? Are you inviting me over?”
Many, many years ago there was an older man who came to our store pretty much weekly for about nine or ten years. He wasn't all that talkative, he came with a plan and left with all the things on his list and always 12 small white grapefruit. Not much conversation, not even any dialoge about the weather, even if it had rained every day in June. Things never changed. He always smelled of mothballs and pipe tobacco. Monk wore old Hathaway wool shirts, real cotton khaki trousers, leather and rubber L.L. Bean boots half laced up and we never saw him without a pipe in his mouth filled with unburned tobacco. He drove a large old pale yellow Ford Squire station wagon that looked retired from his other home in Connecticut. He came on the same day every week at roughly the same time.
A hive has been part of my menagerie for almost a year now. Our bees were transferred from a friend’s chimney (where the bees had been pretty happy for a while) to a couple of bee boxes under an olive tree. Kirk Anderson, a.k.a Kirk O’bee, did the job, and has been our bee guide ever-since. Kirk leads the the 
Best Hotel Bar: The Whiskey Bar at 
The Oscars are less than a week a way, and most people have already weighed in on their top choice for the year. So now it’s time to match your top choice with the perfect Oscar Entrée. 