Levering Cafe; home of the Big Chicken

Levering Cafe
Originally uploaded by jhhymas

We took an outing to the Post Office and decided to continue on to a nearby town for the locally famous special chicken they serve here. The restaurant was full of rooster effigies, to carry out the theme. Alas, someone had just placed a huge order to be picked up and taken out--the special chicken machine was tied up for half an hour. So we just got regular chicken, his grilled in a toasted sandwich and mine "smothered" in swiss cheese, mushrooms and bacon. We each brought half-a-portion home. It was fine, but we still don't know why the special chicken is so famous!
Walking into the place was like a trip back in time. Several people were smoking in the dim brown light. The walls were plain wood with various rooster items hung on them. We sat down at a dark-red-oilcloth-covered square table. Most of the other tables were full; there was one waitress and one sub-waitress who brought your drinks and cleaned off the tables. She also filled the pepper shaker, after I removed the lid and set both shaker and lid artfully on the edge of the table. A heavy woman helped a man with a damaged left side to a table. A teen with a funny haircut, like a cartoon baby with a curl on the top of his head, was eating dinner with his parents. He held his mouth about an inch above the plate. Lots of ordinary people, just like us, chewed and swallowed. I was quite comfortable. It made me think of the video I saw today about the Mad Magazine artist, Rick Tulka, who sketches every day in a cafe in Paris. He was comfortable in that cafe, even though it was famous, in Paris, and the former haunt of famous writers like Hemingway and Henry Miller, it was comfortable to him. He rode his bicycle there every day at the same time and often found that he had already drawn all the patrons of that hour. I wished I could sketch, invisibly. And then I drove home through the rain and looked at the clouds.