I’ve just spent a few days at PubSub’s Granite State Research Kitchen up in Nashua, NH. It’s in an enormous brick building that used to be a textile mill back in New Hampshire’s industrial heyday. A lot of these old piles, which are all over the place up there, have now been converted into high-tech office complexes, pottery studios, and cutesy-poo shopping malls.
The first thing you see when you enter the building is a larger-than-life wooden cigar-store Indian. He looks pretty much like the prefab one in this picture (I found this image here – hope its owners don’t mind):
Shading his eyes, the brawny warrior gazes past you into the distance as you come through the front door. Is he scanning the blue horizon for smoke signals? Following the flight of a soaring eagle? I doubt it. My feeling is that he is probably too embarrassed to make eye contact, not only because his descending career arc has brought him from hunting bison on the majestic plains of the West all the way down to hawking handfuls of Presidentes, but also because he has apparently been coerced into wearing, as a token of his subjugation, a fetching, knee-length, American-flag skirt.
I find it interesting that you can get away with that up in New Hampshire. Here in Gotham you’d have picketers outside your place in about twenty minutes.