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.