Café Surfing

I like sitting in cafés. I know the menu of the bookstore café by heart, especially the unusual bits. There’s NO STRESS! (orange juice, carrot, ginger and a shot of royal jelly) and Energy (fruit juice, organic yoghurt, lecithin and bran). (wtf is lecithin?). There’s also the cinnamon-and-raisin-bagel-with-walnut-and-honey-cream-cheese.

But today, I haven’t made it to the bookstore yet. I’m at Dendy, near the square where they have the Sunday antique market under the trees. On the pavement outside, watching people go by. Bright summer clothes. A man in faded check pants with his two daughters. The older one holds a flower. Mischievous half-smile on the slightly chubby younger one. She runs her hand along the silver backs of the chairs, one after the other. Almost does the same to my shoe, which sticks out at chair height, but catches herself and staggers-off happily.

A craggy-faced man sits next to me, sipping no-nonsense plain coffee from a medium size cup. I picture him thinking dour thoughts, like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, mocking my café latte. Craggy face turns out to be not alone. His visitor is a woman in crutches. Her clothes are expensive but too young & shiny for her. Not the woman I pictured for craggy face. They leave.

There’s a shop across the street, Blooming Art. I wonder whether it’s a shop for paintings about flowers. Lot of flowers, only one painting, so I’m probably wrong. Above, on the second floor, there are plumes behind the window. Greeny yellow and faded orange. They look like the feathers that burlesque dancers wear, or the wavy things you see on coral reefs.

Odd noise, like a horse wearing metal coco-nut shells for shoes… a bride and groom come around the corner on a silver and white Vespa, tin-cans tied to the back. She’s wearing the lacy head-dress thing that brides wear. I’m worried for a moment, because she’s brown-skinned. I’m always nervous when brown people do something weird, hoping that people won’t laugh at them and so at me. Ever the brown sahib. Two middle-aged women (they took craggy-face’s chair) laugh, but it’s not a condescending laugh. I relax. Flip open my trusty lappy. With the scratched copper cover and the thumb marks on the screen...