Fairwell to a Friendly Place (2002)

It was a little (and little-used) booth, built of dark, old wood and poorly lit, stuck into the back corner of a less-than-popular coffee shop near the University. (If that, in itself, seems a contradiction in terms, I should perhaps point out that they did not serve Cappu, Latte, nor Espresso...and there was a Starbucks quite nearby).

The waitress was motherly rather than sexy, (by 'motherly', I mean that she was short-spoken, generally in an ill-humor and preferred no customers to good tips. MY mother ... that sort of 'motherly'.) the coffee strong and usually not fresh until I'd run the first pot empty....but the honey-cream blintzes were unequalled in the known universe, and as long as at least a couple were ordered every couple of hours or so, refills on the coffee remained free.

I was frequently accused of residing there. Since they were open all night and all day, I guess it's small wonder that the waitress seemed perpetually grumpy...I never saw another but her.

If this were my usual sort of tale, this booth would be the setting for the conversation with the strange man of indeterminate accent, who provided the necessary shove that impelled me off into unknown realms and perilous adventures.

This isn't that sort of story. The only conversations in which I participated normally included 'why THIS place?', 'more coffee?', or 'hey, if you're late again, Prof Jenner is gonna take your head off!'...unless they were conversations with my muse: one-sided dialog in ink on soft, white paper.

It was, despite all prior description, a learning environment. It was where I learned that scenes of battle are never adequately described unless viewed through drifting smoke: and therefore why I smoke, continually and without awareness or much pleasure, and completely without regard for my health. It was where I learned that stimulants such as caffiene and too much sugar are far more conducive to creative thinking than any 'adequate' amount of sleep, and where I learned the ultimate physical limits of my own insides...as determined by the ultimate necessity of rising from my musings to hurry to the 'facilities'

I'd chosen it because it was less than popular, because I wasn't going to school...I was going 'back to school', and the companionship of the other students was wearying. Even the companionship of tight-sweatered, liberated, ultra-feminine and 'trying-to-be-mature-and-therefore-interested-in-an-older-man' fellow students. It was 'my' place, a place inhabited by elves and dragons, rhyme and meter, elipses and parenthetics, a place where the rattle of silverware that had never been silver simulated the rattle of sabers, and the scent of the booth being too near the restrooms was masked, with limited success, by the aroma of ashtrays too seldom emptied.

There, in lieu of the company of the too-young, I conversed with Tolkein and Lewis, with Burns and Burroughs and Browning (who often spoke to me only of her love for another man), with Sir Walter Scott and Howard Fast and Robert Heinlein and with Ray Bradbury and Gene Roddenberry and Frodo Baggins...all of whom thought I was brilliant and worthy company.

It came down overnight, to provide another parking garage 'conveniently located' to the mall and the office tower. My companions, my dearest friends, I conclude were unable to make their escape before the wrecking ball swung: they never found me again, and I never again found a place where I was so much at home, so much myself when alone with myself. I often wondered, in later years, if I, too, had been too slow to escape the wrecking ball.

Though I never, as I say, found that same rich environ again, there was once a place where the same sort of mislayed and varied thoughts strayed through my brain...though I exchanged Burns for Burch, Lewis for Charles, EBBrowning for RDMac, Burroughs for Pollack ad infinitum and et cetera, though there was no one, ever, to replace dear Tolkein (and though they did not, always, find me quite so brilliant nor worthy). It was comfortable in a nebulous, half-imagined way. Half, for though the company was as real and less predictable, the environs were left entirely to my imaginings, and therefore often bore an odd resemblance to a little (and little-used) booth, built of dark, old wood and poorly lit, stuck into the back corner of a less-than-popular coffee shop near the University.

The biggest difference, I fear, lay inside me. It was there, I think, that most of my attention now lay...and that, perhaps, is why, again, I never saw the wrecking ball coming. The building, of course, escaped harm...it was elastic, fluid and virtual, and well able to duck. For other reasons, so were my new friends.

If one of them cried a warning, I must have missed it in my reverie.

There probably wasn't time, anyway, sudden as such things can be. Accidents of the heart occur at the speed of thought...and even my old thoughts are sometimes too fast to follow.

Still, I miss the thoughts that ran, wayward and uncontrolled, through mists of blue-gray smoke, puddles of stale coffee, and the sticky remains of the world's most wonderful honey-cream blintzes, leaving sweet tracks on my heart, oddly like the salty ones on my face.

Another time, maybe. Another time, my friends.

I carved my name on the table in the back booth: I hope you don't mind.