Oh I do not remember the name of this restaurant. It was just down the street from the sculpture garden in central Des Moines. White table clothes, a sort of Euro-name. I place I might pause on my scrubbier days and think “Am I underdressed for this?” But I wasn’t too scrubby and I needed some breakfast (the free hotel breakfasts I’ve been living off of are dreadful, soggy starchy full of chemicals, but they’re right at the base of the stairs, practically the foot of the bed). But no hotel breakfast to be had, so no excuse not to have a grown up for-real meal. This was a really big breakfast, I didn’t realize when I ordered, and the staff just let me eat and people watch. The food was fine but not amazing – the omelet a little salty, the bread good, the fruit impressively fresh for the middle of winter in Iowa, the coffee Midwestern. The service really nice and professional, and the restaurant is beautiful in an Italian way – white table cloths, high ceilings, glass hanging fixtures, windows, natural light. Sunday upmarket families having brunch. Perfectly nice.
Except, and here is where I stop talking about food, the fellow next to me spent his entire breakfast, and his visiting long lost old friend’s breakfast, and MY ear space in a small-table eatery talking about his NOSE. The saga of his nose, he kept having nose bleeds, he kept picking his nose, he thought he had cancer, brain tumor, some rare blood disease, he baffled (and took up space in) Japan’s medical system, in Iowa’s medical health system – I want whatever coverage he has. Drama drama drama, nose nose nose. In the end, you know what the climax of listening to this loud puff talk about his nose bleeds was? No disease, no cancer. He’d picked a hole right through his septum. That’s why it was bleeding through the whole medical adventure. The man couldn’t keep his damn finger out his nose.
Let that be your lesson of the day. The End.
The Amusing Mouth 