The view out the north windows this morning is pedestrian.
The sky flat and chalky. A cement gray band of lake stretches between two
maples which have sullenly refused to color up this fall. The cars go back and
forth, back and forth on the parkway. The river looks like cold tea. It’s
gloomy. It looks too much like how it really is. I want to pull down the shades
and let the lamplight transform reality.
On the other hand, out the east window I’m gazing over rooftops
to the freshly painted face of the old Whiting Hotel. The bricks are café au
lait and the window frames cherry. Beyond that, pigeons, gulls, and starlings
whirl around the copper peak of the Park Place. The clouds are darker on this
side, more dramatic. This could be somewhere else. This could be the view of not home. This could be a café.
And I could be writing a letter to a dear friend. Or finishing
a poem. Or jotting down metaphors of yesterday’s landscape.
When did I stop writing in cafes? Easy enough to say it
happened when I got a fulltime job, but that’s not the case. I spent six years independent
contracting, and never once – not one single time – did I opt to trade my desk
at home for the downtown cafes. Maybe it’s that the personality of cafes has
changed. In the old days of Northern Michigan, there weren’t “real” cafés with
leather couches and fake fireplaces and espresso machines. There were diners
and Big Boys, unselfconscious places, perhaps because we were using them in a
manner to which they were not intended. Like a beach rock holding open a door.
Next month, Toby Press is bringing out a memoir by Aharon
Appelfeld called A Table for One. One
of Israel’s most celebrated novelists, much of his work was written at
different tables in different Jerusalem cafes. In this new book, he talks about
the unselfconscious kind of cafes, not
…a nexus, a point of
transition, a place where you wait impatiently…. Real cafes are inviting, they
tempt you with fresh coffee and a cake straight out of the oven, and offer the
chance to spend a precious hour or two alone with yourself.
Appelfeld also talks about the people who frequent cafes:
Those who sit in cafes
are generally people who find their own homes cramped, or for whom loneliness
is a frequent companion, people from foreign parts who have gathered so they
can speak their native tongue and share memories.
But mostly, he talks about his café education:
Cafe Peter was my
first school for writing. There I learned that simple words are the precise
ones, and that daily life is our most true expression.
At Café Peter I
learned how to listen to speech, to distinguish between what was spoken and
what was unspoken; about what it was possible to speak of and about what was
forbidden. At Café Peter, I became aware of myself and the people around me.
Aware but not self-conscious, for a café may offer coffee
and cake, but there is so much more.
There are times I feel
that a café is a port to which all gates of the imagination are open. You sail
toward distant lands, you are again with people you loved. Toward evening, a café
can resemble a secular prayer house in which people are immersed in
observation.
I bow my head to early winter afternoons and small cafes and
a book, empty or not.