Bagel

Three friends are in town early morning. In a few hours two of them are heading home, flying off in separate directions, while the other drives along the country roads back to work. He’s brought his out-of-town friends to his favorite bagel place. Tucked away in a warehouse district, the joint’s made up of a long counter, a couple of booths and a picnic table. Big ovens line the back wall. The owners are from Montreal, he tells them. After ordering bagels with cream cheese, the men sit together at a table, talk returning to the last few shared days at the retreat center—of all the projects picked up, discussed, brought forward in small steps. Someone looks at a watch. Almost time to go. All of a sudden a bagel appears—its unexpected arrival signaled by a waft of doughy bread—lofted between the three friends on the end of a ridiculously long oven paddle. It floats there between them a moment then, with a flick of the baker’s wrist, slides off into a basket. “Try this one,” he barks from across the counter, smiling broadly. It’s covered in dark seeds. One of the men tears the bagel into thirds and passes the steaming bread around to the others. They step out into the misty morning, each happy, for the moment satisfied and full, ready for what the next portion of the day will bring.

Walking Lubbock

Whenever Curtis and I meet we go out for a long ramble. It’s inevitable. Today he wants to show me around downtown Lubbock. It’s early fall and unseasonably cool; it has even rained a little this morning. We wear lights pants, t-shirts, sneakers, both have on backpacks filled with books and extra gear. It’s only a few suburban blocks to the Texas Tech campus. A trio of barky dogs follows along a fence, tails wagging, then waits with us until we cross the eight-lane boulevard; we side-step the SUVs and the giant puddles caused by flash flooding. I can’t help noticing that the women walking to and from class wear their t-shirts especially long, enough to cover their shorts. Curtis tells me this is done to neutralize their sexuality, that it works like a uniform. I don’t entirely agree. At least for me, the hidden shorts and the exposed legs look like a guy’s fantasy of a woman the morning after, naked except for his shirt. Maybe it’s the baseball cap and the running shoes that bring the uniform back from the fantasy realm. Soon we pass out of the walking paths and student buildings and parking lots and move into a new kind of grid. Downtown Lubbock feels bombed out, abandoned. We joke about it being like an episode of the Walking Dead and wonder about the real town down in Georgia that they film the show in. What would it be like growing up in that town? Down one block we turn there are two Latino men strolling down the middle of the street. They are dressed sharply and give us a polite nod as they pass. There are other men sprawled out in a rough semi-circle around a homeless shelter, chatting and chilling. We are the only white boys around with backpacks and water bottles, that’s for sure. Anther turn and we’re heading through campus housing. Our talk has turned to Curtis’ recent sabbatical and the months he and his wife spent in Argentina. I am jealous of their adventurousness and freedom, their life on the road. It takes us a moment to realize that we are walking too close behind a woman. I get Curtis to slow his pace, allowing her the space to get to her car without the potential menace of our presence. A half hour later, and we’re crossing back over the boulevard jammed with cars that don’t make room for two guys on foot. Somebody honks. The puddles have evaporated. The dry heat rises up off the ground in an invisible waft.

Killing Time

The bar opens promptly at four, the bartender dropping his cigarette and propping the door behind him. I have walked around the square twice, but still I am the first customer of the afternoon. The whiskey bar’s interior must have been carted across the Atlantic, piece by piece, including the old-fashioned ceiling: when I cross over the threshold some rough magic transports me back into an Irish pub. I make the young bartender laugh by ordering a gin martini. “If something something something,  than an Irish bartender can make a dry martini.” I’m not listening very carefully but smile, anyway, and lift the top-heavy glass carefully, first as toast then as opening gambit. Sitting back with a sigh, I release the day’s small worries as dusky light pushes through the bar’s high windows. Now that’s what I am talking about. I have been roaming downtown Burlington’s rain-soaked streets, grimly reliving a few lost days in my 20s: fresh off a Greyhound, an afternoon to kill and just enough cash to haunt the cafes, to buy a used paperback; eventually napping in the square among the hippies and bums, the tourists nibbling at their boxed lunches. It has made me lonely, made me feel old. There is a little over an hour left before I’m to meet friends for an early dinner, then a night in town before heading out early to the airport and back toward home; no reason then not to order a double IPA and open a book—Tomas Espedal’s Tramp—or take out this notebook and jot down a few impressions. The bartender tells a young couple about the bar’s origins—the first of a least a dozen retellings. I pack up my things. The sun has hidden itself behind a picket line of clouds; the evening crowd’s beginning to surge. I hitch up my daypack like a real walker—a wayfarer, as Espedal names himself—and set out for the next portion of my stroll, already hungry for dinner.