Skip to main content

How It All Comes Together


 

I always seem to be in my car at mealtime these days. These past few months have been an exercise in trying not to eat the worst sort of food while driving either to or from during lunch and/or dinner. I know it’s not good for me but often I don’t have the energy to do better.

The one bright light in the vast wasteland of grab-and-go eating has been Bon Fresco. Their food soothes me and calms my stomach no matter how crummy I feel. It’s slight out of my way but it is absolutely worth it. The quality of the food is excellent, the prices are fair, and the customer service is outstanding.

I regret many things these days but I don’t regret one cent I’ve spent at Bon Fresco. One of the employees now recognizes me and calls me by name. I will forever be indebted to them for complimenting me on my favorite summer pants - - which are honestly on their last legs - -  on a day when I felt about one hundred years old. 

My favorite menu items are the London Broil sandwich (no onions), the curried chicken salad, the Mediterranean salad, and the Linzer cookies. Oh: the bread. That ciabatta is everything. The other day I discovered their apple pastries and I am now in serious trouble. 

The other day I placed an order online and pulled into the shopping center off of Oakland Mills Road a bit too soon. There were no parking places near the restaurant.


Image from Google Maps


There were, however, a few places down by Queen Takes Book. I took this as a sign. I spent a few minutes noodling around the store and came upon a cool workbook-style publication on learning to draw cartoons. I had a little conversation with myself inside my head.

This book is going to be at least twenty dollars and you can’t justify that.

I turned the book over. It was twelve ninety-five. I took this as a sign, too. When the clerk rang it up she discovered I had earned a “five dollars off” coupon and now the book was seven ninety five.

Ping! And now my lunch was ready.

Snowden Center has become quite the happening place over the last several years. They seem to have assembled just the right combination of retail and services to draw people in and encourage repeat business. Of course, whenever it’s a bit on the busy side I worry that people will start complaining that it’s too busy, they can’t find a parking place, or that something about it negatively impacts traffic on the main road…

It’s not hard to imagine people complaining, is it? Columbia/HoCo somehow manages to turn it into a way of life more often than not.

Maybe those people need a Linzer cookie and a good book. 


Village Green/Town² Comments


Comments

  1. Julia A. McCreadyJune 7, 2026 at 3:56 AM

    Please do not submit comments here. This function will be disabled shortly. Use the link above instead. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...
1 comment
Read more

They Can Wait

This is not a typical Saturday post. That’s because, in my community, it’s not a typical Saturday.  Oakland Mills High School, after years of deferred repair, needs massive renovation. It’s pretty simple: when you don’t fix a problem it gets bigger. The school system itself said the the OMHS school building was  "no longer conducive to learning" back in 2018.  2018 .  But Thursday the Boad of Education voted to push it out of the lineup of important projects which will be given the go-ahead to proceed soonest.  In my opinion it’s a terrible decision and sets a dangerous precedent. To explain, here’s the advocacy letter I sent in support of Oakland Mills High School. I was rather proud of it. I am writing to ask you to proceed with needed renovation at Oakland Mills High School in the most timely and comprehensive manner humanly possible. I have read the letter sent to you by the Oakland Mills Community Association and I am in complete agreement. You are extremel...
1 comment
Read more

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...
1 comment
Read more