At Elliot Bay Book Company in the afternoon

Liquorice spice tea, an odd combination of orange and anis. Veggie chili soup and a foccacia with mozarella, red peppers, tapenade and basil. This is my lunch in the basement of Elliot Bay.
A bookshop should have a café. All bookshops should. Without a time limit, of course.
Even in an old wooden place like this, technology breaks through. You get an electronic device when you place your order, then bring it to your table and when the food is ready it starts flashing and you can go to the counter and get it. Cool and totally out of place. :-)

The waiter is singing along with the music coming from the loudspeakers by the counter. It’s unusually loud and cheerful for a bookstore, but then this is the café.
Upstairs you can buy a poster with a poem that William Stafford wrote for a jubilee for the store. Isn’t it strange how after you hear of someone for the first time, the name pops up just about everywhere? I didn’t know anything about Stafford before William Males talked about him on the latest Storvik gathering.

A bearded man in a weird man dance
Talking to himself like me
Is he really mad or simply stuck
in a thought chain that wants out
by any means, even if you have to
wriggle and roll to do it