Sunday Salon ~ food, fun, music, and books

FOOD

Marcy Williams

Deer Creek Café.  That's where I went on my first excursion on the Crown Center's bus last week.  Marcy Williams and her husband Rick own the Deer Creek Café and made sure our group of fifteen was satisfied with the food and the service.  This week, I'm signed up to hear local author Pat Lorraine Simons discuss her 2013 novel, Brothers on the Run.  It's based on a true story.  I borrowed the book from the library and read it in preparation for this upcoming trip to the Brodsky Library.  Here's a look at our schedule of events for July.  I chose these activities this month.

BOOKS

The book I'm reading is Unless, a 2002 novel by Carol Shields.  Here's what the protagonist of this first-person novel thinks of the word "unless" (p. 224):

Novels help us turn down the volume of our own interior "discourse," but unless they can provide an alternative, hopeful course, they're just so much narrative crumble.  Unless, unless.

Unless is the worry word of the English language.  It flies like a moth around the ear, you hardly hear it, and yet everything depends on its breathy presence.  Unless — that's the little subjunctive mineral you carry along in your pocket crease.  It's always there, or else not there.  (If you add a capital s to unless, you get Sunless...)

I bought this book for a quarter at the University City Library.  I got my second library card there, after the St. Louis County Library card I got when I first moved here.  St. Louis County has twenty branch libraries, and I've been to two of them.  Like in Chattanooga, though, I mostly go to the closest branch.  In Chattanooga, I lived near the Northgate branch in Hixson.  In St. Louis, I live a couple of miles from the Mid-County branch.  Since I technically live in University City (people here say "U-City"), I'm not too far from the U-City library, either.

JEWISH?

Before we eat on Friday evenings, the Shabbat (Sabbath) candles are lit while two people recite the prayers for bread and for wine.  I have memorized the prayer for bread, and my last name is Jacobs.  So it isn't surprising that, this past Friday evening, Michael asked me if I'm Jewish.  I would have loved to be able to take part by reciting the prayer, but he chose a Jewish woman from my table instead.

MUSIC

On my way back to my apartment after dinner that evening, Robert — who mans the desk some evenings — told me he wants to learn to play the piano.  He likes for me to play the piano in the lounge near his desk, always asking me if I'm planning to practice that evening.  He opens the doors to the lounge so he can hear what I'm playing.  We have had musicians come in to entertain us, but I've never seen any residents playing the piano.  I told Robert I'd be happy to teach him some of the basics, like how to find "middle C" on the piano.  I have found the box in which I packed my music books, so I'll have more to play now.

Bloggers gather in the Sunday Salon — at separate computers in different time zones — to talk about our lives and our reading.