Safety Fork, the

Today was nice. I got to sleep in until nine—and even then not move from bed until ten. I had a nice lunch of sandwiches with delicious, thick, juicy slices of tomato. At about one in the afternoon I decided not to bang my head against a programming project I’ve been thinking of starting. Instead, I started writing some postcards to people who gave me graduation gifts or came to my party. It’s been two months, now, and given that even the university bureaucracy finally got around to sending out my diploma, I figured that I could take action.

That didn’t last long, as I came across the gift certificates that my dad’s cousin John gave me: one to a nice restaurant and one to a bookstore. Always a fan of bookstores, I couldn’t write a note of thanks without having at least checked the place out, I reasoned. So I hopped into my car, burned my palms on the steering wheel (it’s aflame in the summer and frozen in the winter; I think there are a total of about two months of the year during which I can steer my car in relative comfort), and drove into Minneapolis.

I parked in a residential area a few blocks away (I don’t like parking on busy streets) and walked to Magers & Quinn Booksellers. Now this is a bookstore. It’s roughly two and a half small shops packed with bookshelves, and on the bookshelves are books of about every kind imaginable. Not just the shiny new editions of books you’ll look hip reading that are carried by the big chains, but also used copies of things out of print, collectible books, random sets of books printed in 1907—my favorite was a seven-book set of Russian history written in Russian. I couldn’t read it, but it was still cool.

At about five o’clock, I finished looking around and bought a copy of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, volume three (“Damn you, gulag archipelago inmates!”). After getting some dinner, I didn’t really want to go home, so I walked a little less than half-way around Lake Calhoun, found a bench, and read a couple of chapters. By the time I got back to my car a little before nine, there were the makings of a nice sunset.

Just before I got home, I realized how thirsty I was—and how much I dreaded drinking the water at my apartment—so I stopped at Target so that I could finally break down and buy one of those faucet-mounted water filters. I’m usually fairly tolerant of water impurities, but I concede that it made a world of difference, enough that I enjoyed two large glasses of water from where my palate usually only grudginly accepts one. A worthy investment, I think.