It's dark inside and over achieving in its dinginess. The booths are covered in red, cracked pleather. Khaki synthetic stuffing pokes out here and there like the first buds of Spring on Mars. The tables are wide and spackled with ketchup or syrup from this morning and many mornings before. The smell of fried eggs, day old coffee and cigarettes coupled with the futile floral air freshener the manager picked up at The Dollar Store, "to class the place up", is overwhelming at first, but gradually blends together. At the counter, the old men sit drinking their coffee, pouring over their daily news and their memories.
Sometimes, I'm alone there. When that's the case, I get a big smile from the 60 something year old waitress as she meanders over with a full pot of 5 hour old, bitter, thick black coffee and says,
It's more a statement of fact than a question, as she lifts my cup and fills it without getting any reply, anxious to return to the counter and her aging flirtations.
When it's busy, there's no smile, but there is an almost sweet, agreeable succession or arrangement of sounds that pulses through and makes me feel invisible. The clinking of glasses, the tinny vibration of forks hitting knives while cutting pancakes, the resonant bass sound of the male voices, and the twittering high altos and sopranos of the women and children, may sound like a cacophony to some, but in that moment, to me, it's Mozart.
My note book and pen always find their way to the table, as this is not the kind of place one brings a laptop, even if one has one. Gradually, as I sit drinking coffee and trying to write without thinking too hard, I become part of the background.
Others walk in off the street, looking for what I've found in the minutes since I, too, walked through the door. When I look up, briefly, at the couple walking in, it occurs to me they look like worms after a thunder storm; so full of emotional rain that they are unable to move out of the way of the inevitable sunlight. And we all know that too much sunlight burns.
I look away when I see people like that, because at night, in this eclectic cafe, it hurts too much to see reflections. I look back at my notebook. On the page, I've drawn a bird, eating a worm.
