I leafed through it while she swiped Led On by Fate with the light pen.
“Your guardian angel goes with you everywhere,” it said. “It’s always there, right beside you, wherever you go.” There was a line drawing of an angel with large wings looming over a woman in a grocery checkout line. “You can ignore them, you can even pretend they don’t exist, but that won’t make them go away.”
Until the fad’s over, I thought.
I checked out Led On by Fate and a book on chaos theory and Mandelbrot diagrams so I’d have a pretext for going down to Bio to see what Dr. O’Reilly was wearing, and went over to the Pearl Street Mall.
Lorraine was right. The bookstore had Angel in My Condo and The Cherubim Cookbook on a sale rack, and The Angel Calendar was marked fifty percent off. There was a big display up front for Faerie Encounters of the Fourth Kind.
I went upstairs to the kids’ section and more fairies: The Flower Fairies (which had been a fad once before, back in the 1910s); Fairies, Fairies Everywhere; More Fairies, Fairies Everywhere; and The Land of Faerie Fun. Also Batman books, Lion King books, Power Rangers books, and Barbie books.
I finally managed to find a hardback copy of Toads and Diamonds, which I’d loved as a kid. It had a fairy in it, but not like those in Fairies, Fairies, Etc., with lavender wings and bluebells for hats. It was about a girl who helps an ugly old woman who turns out to be a good fairy in disguise. Inner values versus shallow appearances. My kind of moral.
I bought it and went out into the mall. It was a beautiful Indian summer day, balmy and blue-skied. The Pearl Street Mall on a Saturday’s a great place to analyze trends, since, one, there are hordes of people, and two, Boulder’s almost terminally hip. The rest of the state calls it the People’s Republic of Boulder, and it’s got every possible kind of New Ager and falafel stand and street musician.
There are even fads in street music. Guitars were out and bongos were in again. (The first time was in 1958, at the height of the Beat movement. Very low ability threshold.) Flip’s buzzcut-and-swag was very in, and so was the buzzcut-and-message. And duct tape. I saw two people with strips around their sleeves and one with dreadlocks and a bowler had a wide band of duct tape wrapped around his neck like the ones the French had worn during the à la victime fad after the Revolution.
Which was incidentally the last time women had cut their hair short until the 1920s, and it was a snap to trace that fad to its source. Aristocrats had had their hair chopped off to make it easier on the guillotine, and after the Empire was reinstated, relatives and friends had worn their hair short in sympathetic tribute. They’d also tied narrow red ribbons around their necks, but I doubted if that was what the dreadlocks person had had in mind. Or maybe it was.
Backpacks were out, and tiny, dangling wallets-on-a-string were in. Also Ugg boots, and kneeless jeans, and plaid flannel shirts. There wasn’t an inch of corduroy anywhere. In-line skating with no regard for human life was very much in, as was walking slowly and obliviously four abreast. Sunflowers were out and violets were in. Ditto the Sinéad O’Connor look, and hair wraps. The long, thin strands of hair wrapped in brightly colored thread were everywhere.
Crystals and aromatherapy were out, replaced apparently by recreational ethnicity. The New Age shops were advertising Iroquois sweat lodges, Russian banya therapy, and Peruvian vision quests, $249 double occupancy, meals included. There were two Ethiopian restaurants, a Filipino deli, and a cart selling Navajo fry bread.
And half a dozen coffeehouses, which had apparently sprung up like mushrooms overnight: the Jumpstart, the Espresso Espress, the Caffe Lottie, the Cup o’ Joe, and the Caffe Java.
After a while I got tired of dodging mimes and in-line skaters and went into the Mother Earth, which was now calling itself the Caffe Krakatoa (east of Java). It was as crowded inside as it had been out on the mall. A waitress with a swag haircut was taking names. “Do you want to sit at the communal table?” she was asking the guy in front of me, pointing to a long table with two people at it, one at each end.
That’s a trend that’s moved over here from England, where strangers have to share tables in order to keep up with the gossip on Prince Charles and Camilla. It hasn’t caught on particularly over here, where strangers are more apt to want to talk about Rush Limbaugh or their hair implants.
I had sat at communal tables a few times when they were first introduced, thinking it was a good way to get exposure to trends in language and thought, but a taste was more than enough. Just because people are experiencing things doesn’t mean they have any insight into them, a fact the talk shows (a trend that has reached the cancerous uncontrolled growth stage and should shortly exhaust its food supply) should have figured out by now.
The guy was asking, “If I don’t sit at the communal table, how long a wait?”
The waitress sighed. “I don’t know. Forty minutes?” and I certainly hoped that wasn’t going to be a trend.
“How many?” she said to me.
“Two,” I said, so I wouldn’t have to sit at the communal table. “Foster.”
“It has to be your first name.”
“Why?” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “So I can call you.”
“Sandra,” I said.
“How do you spell that?”
No, I thought, please tell me Flip isn’t becoming a trend. Please.
I spelled Sandra for her, grabbed up the alternative newspapers, and settled into a corner for the duration. There was no point in trying to do the personals till I was at a table, but the articles were almost as good. There was a new laser technology for removing tattoos, Berkeley had outlawed smoking outdoors, the must-have color for spring was postmodern pink, and marriage was coming back in style. “Living together is passé,” assorted Hollywood actresses were quoted as saying. “The cool thing now is diamond rings, weddings, commitment, the whole bit.”
“Susie,” the waitress called.
No one answered.
“Susie, party of two,” she said, flipping her rattail. “Susie.”
I decided it was either me or somebody who’d given up and left. “Here,” I said, and let a waiter with a Three Stooges haircut lead me to a knee-mashing table by the window. “I’m ready to order,” I said before he could leave.
“I thought there were two in your party,” he said.
“The other person will be here soon. I’ll have a double tall caffè latte with skim milk and semisweet chocolate on top,” I said brightly.
The waiter sighed and looked expectant.
“With brown sugar on the side,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “Sumatra, Yergacheffe, or Sulawesi?” he said.
I looked to the menu for help, but there was nothing there but a quote from Kahlil Gibran. “Sumatra,” I said, since I knew where it was.
He sighed. “Seattle-or California-style?”
“Seattle,” I said.
“With?”
“A spoon?” I said hopefully.
He rolled his eyes.
“What flavor syrup?”
Maple? I thought, even though that seemed unlikely. “Raspberry?” I said.
That was apparently one of the choices. He slouched off, and I attacked the personals. There was no point in circling the NSs. They were in virtually every ad. Two had it in their headline, and one, placed by a very intelligent, strikingly handsome athlete, had it listed twice.