saucer, yarn, books

the flying saucer is a very good place to spend an afternoon. come up out of the ground at the atlantic terminal in brooklyn. walk up atlatnic toward the water past shops selling incense, oils and prayer rugs, past hank's saloon where i know for a fact they put hot dogs on a grill right on the sidewalk in summer, to a part of the ave that's on the edge of hip but wasn't two years ago. if you're not paying attention you will pass the saucer and will end up in a sea of boutique bakeries and antique shops. you could also stop by a decent yarn store- but head back to the saucer.

the furniture is busted yard sale but the soups and sandwiches are sassy and they make good tea. if you are lucky you will get there when the cookies re just coming out. there's a cranberry orange one whose name never even suggests the butteriness that might send you back to the counter more than once for just one more.

it is a good place to knit and i go there with other knitting fiends mostly but today i had a yarn emergency and ended up there after all by myself. if you sit in the big couch you can watch the world through the front window. if you sit there with yarn and needles, folks feel the need to chat with you or at the very least stare. today a boy was sitting in the window, maybe sixth grade. all by himself on a barstool leaning against a plank counter gazing out the window or down at a book. he had to have come from quite some bit away because there aren't any schools right nearby. when his dad showed up, they planted themselves on the couch opposite mine, dad with a coffee and the boy with a sandwich.

sometimes when you buy yarn it's in a loose hank and you have to wind it into a ball, which is what i was doing because i left my needles at home and if you're a knitter you know that buying yarn without having your needles with you can make you sick, can make your skin hurt and the backs of your eyes prickly. so you have to interact with the yarn some way to keep breathing and rolling it into a ball was just fine to keep me from hyperventilating. when i looked up from my winding both dad and child were reading. sitting within an inch or two of each other, silent, heads bowed. they have the same eyelashes, chin. dad's book is a hardcover that looks libraryish, which immediately makes me want to thank him. the boy's is a new paperback, something with castles or fantasy. i go back to my work and every time i look up they are exactly the same, side by side. every time i look i notice another similarity. the man is maybe 40, not quite like most hipsters his age who come in, but clearly "of the city". the boy is not the sort his peers would consider "cute" but he will grow up to be fascinating. you can tell.

quite some time passes and the two look up and at each other at precisely the same moment. they get their books and go. i resist the urge to pounce on them and tell them about how it nearly makes me cry to see a man and his child reading in public like that, how i wish every student in my class had a dad like him. i want to heap so much praise on him he will blush because what he's doing is so huge and i keep thinking of what a gift he's giving his boy. as they leave together i see the way he looks at his child, like he is seeing a mythical creature, like the boy might disappear at any second. the boy is giving just as spectacular a gift, being such a beautiful thing, loving what his dad loves with his eyelashes hanging over the pages exactly the same way.