BEFORE THE AGE OF CANDY DRINKS

Having just listened to a friend on social media recite the berakha (Moroccan rite) for rain falling in huge quatities for the first time this wet season, it is ironic that sun is shining in through the window. And slightly insulting, too. Which is a datum that unless you are Dutch, fairly familiar with the Portuguese Synagogue in Mokum Alef though not Jewish yourself, a linguaphile as well as peculiarly Brabantish, and living in a culturally multi-facetted city, may not make much sense to you. It's a time, a place, a different place, and a personal thing.
It's the weather we're having.

After yesterday morning, it is obvious to me that both my apartment mate (the person who lives in the other bedroom) and I myself are more than a little bit borderline spectrumish verging on autistic. The medical procedure started around seven thirty. We arrived at the vein and vascular place for my check-in shortly after six. In a rainstorm. Plenty of time. Neither she nor I saw anything unusual about doing so. I know that I like to be way ahead of the appointed time for doctors. And apparently she sees nothing wrong with being there no ifsandsorbuts more than an hour early either. She had brought a book.

Yeah, you know, if it had been the last helicopter out of a burning city, both of us and several of our friends would be on the tarmac with full thermos flasks and umbrellas several months before the first bombs fell, at the right spot, with comfy blankets and correct papers. Plus foreign currency for lodging in wherever when we got there. And emergency numbers. Because someone would have told us to be on time.

In retrospect, the light and shade in the street outside the clinic, as observed several times through windows before and after surgery, was quite interesting. Blues, greys, and pinkish light on buff walls or reflected from smooth surfaces. Apparently the building dates from 1986. So it's four decades old, more or less. Oddly, I cannot remember the hole in the ground that must have been dug to lay the foundations, though that is a part of the city I am quite familiar with. There used to be a very mediocre pastry and donut place across the street.

There used to be many more very mediocre pastry and donut places in this city. Before the no-smoking rules went into effect. One could chain-smoke over a crappy baked thing for hours during rainy weather in many neighborhoods. The hot coffee was horrible, and the company often skeevy, but with two or three newspapers and an ashtray who cared?

One imagines the draughtsmen and engineers in bad donut holes slowly being replaced by nurses and surgeons, plus international tourists despairing over finding a decent croissant, from Geary Street all the way to the wharf. Before better coffee drove all the small greasy places out of existence, and Gauloises or Gitanes got replaced by surreptitious raspberry watermelon vapes and generous lines of cocaine in Starbucks bathrooms.


When ahstrays and newspapers started disappearing coffee shops and crappy bakeries with counter seating lost their allure. Almost all the skeevy late night coffee shops are gone now.
Neither Gauloises or Gitanes are imported anymore.
And they're no longer French.

Les temps ont changé.



==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================