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.