This is the story of how Laura had Calamari for the first time. Laura and I had been dating for about a year when we decided to take a weekend trip to Block Island. We went in April, off season. We had the place to ourselves, but not much was open. We had no car, so we were limited to what we could walk to from the port. We stayed at a local inn, and by Sunday afternoon, we had exhausted out options, and had nothing left to do but wait for the return ferry. We had just five dollars left, and needed to eat lunch. There was just one place open, a small seafood joint. We sat down and perused the menu. A calamari appetizer was the only thing we could afford, so I asked her, “do you want to split a plate of fried calamari?”

“Sure!” She said. The waiter came over and we placed our order, and when he left she asked me, “what’s calamari?” You see, Laura was just barely out of the desert and not exactly experienced in the world of seafood.

“It’s squid.” I said.

“Well I’m not eating that,” she said…in her head. Throughout our lives Laura has always had a had a habit of talking to me in her head, sometimes not realizing she wasn’t talking out loud.

Some time goes by and out comes the meal. If you are familiar with this dish, it comes in two parts, there’s the obviously squid parts that are the breaded and fried tentacles, and there’s the not so obviously squid parts that are the tubular body sliced up in to breaded and fried rings.

I dig in, tentacles first, and encourage Laura to start. “I’m not eating that,” she said in her head. “I’ll just have some of these onion rings.” And that is how Laura tried fried squid for the first time.

I keep seeing images on the web that say, this is art and this is not. Though when I see them, I am less likely to think about the nature of art, and more likely to see Simon & Garfunkel in my head.

I drove by this place yesterday, but couldn’t stop to take a photo. I looked it up on Google Maps. It’s clearly owned by a different owner now, but at the time, we were looking for a place to eat on the way to Sunday River, ME. We saw the sign advertising lunch, and we thought it was sketchy, given that it was a gas station. Mark went in to check it out.  A few minutes later, despite all I believed I knew about his standards for restaurants, he was at the door waving us in. Entering the building, we quickly moved through the convenience store part of the shop and saw a diner kitchen installed along the sidewall. We sat at one of the 4 empty diner tables between the aisles and the “kitchen.” By that I mean that there were only four tables total, not just four empty tables. We were the only customers. Our table was along the backside of the snack rack and we had a good view of the engine fluids aisle.

The owner/waiter/cook/clerk/gas-station-attendant who took our order had a Yankees hat on the wall, and Mark asked him how he became a Yankees fan all the way up here in Maine. He was a stocky, tall, energetic gray-haired man who looked to be in his late 50s or early 60s and he was the only other person in the building. He said he used to be a New Yorker and moved to Maine years ago. He took our order, cooked, we ate, nothing remarkable there. But when we went to pay, we took our checks to a register at a counter that had a variety of granite slabs strewn about.

While I was the first at the register, the owner/waiter/cook/clerk/gas station attendant punched up a different price than mine had cost. I looked to the dry erase board where the specials were listed and it had since been erased. I said, “That’s not what mine cost, mine was only $11.95, it said so on that board before.” He responded, “Calm down. You New Yorkers, always thinking someone is trying to screw you. I’m not ringing you up yet!” And gestured to one of the others. After we all settled up, I motioned to what I thought were granite samples he was considering, “Are you having some work done?”  “No,” he said, “I sell and install granite, those are my products.”

I’ll never forget that owner/waiter/cook/clerk/gas-station-attendant/granite salesman. He made what could have been an otherwise unremarkable experience worth remembering.