café

You know your priorities aren’t in order when you start skipping your regular visit to the café – class goes too late, another meeting, too late, too late... How did it come to be so difficult to find the half hour each day – one lousy half hour, stretched maybe to an hour, but with a computer, for God’s sake, in the American way of taking your work to a café, so that it’s not all about the pleasure of being social, it’s also work, café work!

Well now, time to make amends. This day will be different. This day we’ll make it to Paul’s. (I call it Paul’s because without Paul there would not be the convivial atmosphere that I look for, but the place does have an official name – the Oasis. Oh – you wont see that on the outside. It’s EVP there. Confused? So just call it Paul’s, like I do.)





Ed is never on perfect behavior there and most of the time, that’s okay, because Paul can shoot back at him if he needs to, providing the balance that I like to see in these exchanges.

Ed eats soup, I drink coffee. That’s our gig. He reads and dozes, I write. And eventually the sun goes down and we are back at the farmhouse, happy. But there’s a price: it’s frozen lasagna night again. Can’t have it all.