samedi de cette façon

> Buster's Ice Cream Stop, 8.30am Saturday. Coffee, warm ham & cheese croissant, and a most perfect vantage point, don't you think?

This is strange. Wonderfully strange. I've had this habit, in the past several months, of sleeping until noon or so after staying up very late the night before. Then suddenly I find myself awake early in the morning. Is it time for some change?

There is what I refer to as an ice cream café around the block from me. I've rarely ever gone there, regrettably so. But this morning I found myself enroute, gingerly walking with my book to go in, order my coffee and warm ham & cheese croissant, and plant myself at one of the best spots in the place (as the photo clearly shows), a tucked away corner next to the counter that afforded a good view out the window. I love mornings like this where it's still overcast, maybe even a bit foggy, and you can smell the dew and feel the nippy crispness before the sun breaks an hour or two later. The crowd at this time was mostly young attractive married couples with their babies, older couples with their BMWs or Mercedes parked right at the curb, serious cyclists in their tight spandex gear freshing up with coffees after their constitutional early morning group ride, and the occasional hipster geek type. It was mostly whites and Asians who, from what I can glean, most likely had university degrees and were reasonably successful in their lives.

I surprised myself by actually getting back to reading my book (after a couple months not touching it), Christopher Hitchens' The Portable Atheist, a rather fat anthology of writings from great minds like Mark Twain, Salman Rushdie, Spinoza, David Hume, Anatole France, H.P. Lovecraft, Richard Dawkins, Elizabeth Anderson, Sam Harris, George Orwell, H.L. Mencken, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Carl Sagan. This stuff is as stimulating for me as the hot cup of coffee I sipped along with it. Now I want to go the public library and hunt down some more Carl Sagan (thankfully the library is literally across the street).

< Then some time after I came home I said 'Fuck it!' and ran out to the French café half a block down and ordered up a light yet 'pouffy' lunch to bring back - albacore tuna with spicy seed mustard, herbs and red onion, lettuce and tomato on a fresh baguette, celery rémoulade with cornichons on the side, Orangina on the rocks, and for dessert, sea salted almonds in milk chocolate.

It was early enough that the place wasn't packed at all and everyone looked very approachable. Europeans live in the area so it wasn't surprising that a goodlooking young couple briefly sat near me by the window while waiting for their order. I detected what sounded like a French accent from the man, and the woman was so very cute and tall and willowy like a model, but she was very different in atmosphere from your typical flippant and trendy L.A. flake (like I stated, most everyone here looked like they had a university degree or two under their belt).

I was then aware that this, all this - the neighbourhood, my book, the dewy overcast morning, N. back at home just around the block - was precisely why I moved here. I could thrive here, though in a way different from how I did in Chicago. I could cultivate a quiet, culturally dimensional intellectual and emotional life here. And I am, I've been, even if only incrementally. The surroundings have changed, the details changed, but I'm the one who is adapting, all while grounded in the fundamentals of who I've always been.