Stolen (and recycled)

In the city, in the thick of underpaid and underutilized angst and confusion at where life might take me, I used to walk to work to my nonprofit job. Every day the straightest route took me through neighborhoods both quaint (art galleries and Hispanic markets) and disturbing (drug dealers and women forced to prostitution). Some days I felt like tears, certain I could not take one more step into any future, but convinced the risk of stopping was to end up as one of the urine soaked bums in the boarded-up doorways – a failure to my son, a lost father.

Taking a detour on one of those foggy mornings - the kind that suddenly burst into sun and glare - drops from locust trees sparkling as they fell to steaming white sidewalks - my heart rising – I wandered into a small café I had seen before, but been shy about entering - Momi Tobi’s, not far from the Zen Center, but close to Hayes Street. It was intimate, a Victorian chiaroscuro interior. I began to make it a regular morning stop – never telling my wife. I sat and wrote in a notebook – fifteen minutes at the most. It was hard at first. It was time enough for a quick blank verse poem of poor quality, or a scribbled litany of what was wrong in my job or life. Eventually, I salvaged half-dozen good lines from the whole volume of that year.

I never met anyone – simply noted people and their quirks. I avoided the prolonged gaze – the curious and beautiful gay men who smell so nice, the bonne chic young woman with her leather portfolio and café Americano who always sat so primly, the older woman artist with a presence of purpose and sensuality that was surprising in public – she wore slippers in the morning – her studio was in the adjoining alley – a huge window on the second floor of a tilting old building that once must have been a mews. I saw her there at her easel sometimes, framed and proud. Rainy days in a gray raincoat skipping puddles through that alley, I was late for work and glancing at warm lit interiors of odd little apartments.

I took my fifteen minutes. I felt like I was stealing time. I was having an affair with words on paper and a cozy café. The sinner. The thief of time. It seemed so at odds with a practical self – husband, father, worker but I went ahead granting the other self his time.