Wednesday, June 24, 2020

The largest cafe on the main street has closed. It never came back after the lockdown. I’ll miss it, in the way that we miss places that we rarely actually visited. I only went there once. The salad was good, but too expensive. I was unemployed then. The price might have seemed more reasonable if I had returned once I was working. Last week, a banner hung from the awning: “Cafe for sale, fully furnished.” The sign wasn’t there when I passed it today. The cafe has a large patio, covered with astroturf. It had been filled with tables and chairs and servers’ stations. The owners brought them inside when the lockdown started. People now use the patio as an artificial park. They sit on lawn chairs, have picnics, and look out at the traffic. The other most expensive cafe on the street, set into the Heart of the City mall, is gone, too, but they closed long before the lockdown. Signs there had said that the bakery across the street would move in. It hasn’t yet. The signs are gone, but renovations continue. Cafes here are nothing like the ones that I miss from the States. Most are full restaurants, with extensive menus. I don’t see people hanging out for hours with a cup of coffee while working or reading. There’s nothing like a Third Place. I’m told that that’s because life here is based around homes and families. I can easily picture my favorite cafes in most of the cities in which I have lived, though I can’t recall many of the names: the diner in Brooklyn where the dishes would rattle when the subway passed overhead, the endless array of all-night spots in Austin, the cafe in Dallas with the great fruit-laden waffles, the place in Berkeley where I wrote most of The Book of Voices each week, the line of cafes in Cleveland where I performed at open mics, the one in my small New Jersey city where I would read the books that I had gotten on inter-library loan, and all the bookstores in the chain at which I eventually worked. Many nights after I leave my office, I just want to sit somewhere for a few hours and write and read. I always end up at home.