The Salem Orientalist Society

Yesterday morning, I went to a bagel shop in Syracuse to get something to eat later for lunch, and my compadres were ordering bagels made into sandwiches, which I thought were unreasonably expensive at about five dollars apiece, so I just asked for two bagels, a whole-wheat with salmon cream cheese and an onion bagel with jalapeno. Unfortunately, the lady getting them for me apparently has rather more confidence in her English skills than they honestly merit. To my request, she replied, "everything?" which had me rather confused, so I asked her again for the same thing, a little more slowly. She went and grabbed a bagel from the bin labled "multi-grain" rather than "whole wheat," which I figured was close enough to suffice, and she got the onion bagel right. Then, she scooped a half-spoon of what I took to be jalapeno cream cheese and asked me, "half?" and I wondered if she thought I looked a little pudgy, so I nodded in the affirmative. Then, she put it on half of the multi-grain bagel rather than the onion, and proceeded to fill her scoop halfway with a different green-in-white cream cheese and spread it on the other half. This made me slightly concerned, as you might imagine, but I wasn't too worried until she took the bagels and walked back into an adjoining kitchen. When she returned after a tense two full minutes, she'd put smoked salmon on the multi-grain/mystery cheese bagel. We were trying to hurry, and everyone else was waiting by the door by this point. She cut the onion bagel in half and asked me, "salmon?" to which I replied, in a tone that even she could understand, betraying my rising consternation, "no - this cream cheese," I said, pointing to one that looked mostly white with bits of green and orange. She complied and I got up to the register, where I found that a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon costs six dollars. Also, whereas a bagel by itself is $.89, adding cream cheese costs $1.30. It took a couple minutes longer to figure this out, though, because the lady at the till was telling the previous customer about how her dog needs a window slightly open in the winter so he doesn't get nauseated. So, with my eight and a half dollar mystery lunch in tow, I headed out to the singing, where, contrary to their published announcement, they had a pot-luck lunch. As such, I decided to save my extravagant bagels for a more formal occaision, and I've not yet found out what's on either one of them. I've got my fingers crossed that the one with salmon has half peppermint and half chocolate-chip.






















As an aside, I'm now in the second local paper of someone else's locality for the year:
http://www.uticaod.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2006610160307
They did actually interview me, but given what I said, I wasn't too worried about being quoted.

Till we meet again,
A Christian friend