Casual
SKINNER, DAVID
Casual IT'S ALL ABOUT MEME I'm a big talker. Not a boaster or a braggart, I trust, but a voluminous producer of speech. And the number of words I devote to a subject may have nothing to do with...
...I could go on...
...DAVID SKINNER...
...Probably not a good sign, I thought...
...At that establishment, the clerks act like they're stoned—like they really have trouble getting their minds around the wacky concept of people coming inside and asking them for food and cappuccinos and stuff, and then the whole money exchange thing...
...Let it be noted, in my defense, that I've been buying my Sunday morning muffins there for years—so on the scale of causes for complaint this rates a little higher than, say, my difficulty finding a stylish shoe that comes in extra-wide...
...I'm straining the bonds of family and friendship with all my word-blowing on the subject...
...I'd order two salt bagels, nothing on them, to go...
...Two salt bagels, nothing on them, to go...
...I started buying my Sunday necessities at Ann MeMe after much suffering at the hands of another supplier of coffee and baked goods, a fashionable coffee bar...
...On Sunday mornings when I was a boy, my two brothers and I would get impatient waiting for our father to wake up and drive us to the bagel store...
...We'd set the table and arrange the bagels in a basket...
...Recently I stopped in for my muffins and cookies and noticed the store's main display counter had disappeared...
...To go...
...But this much is clear: My Sunday mornings will be slightly but unmistakably less agreeable when this bakery closes...
...We'd return victorious to a houseful of women, my mother and three sisters, still in their pajamas, rubbing their eyes and making coffee...
...So the witless clerk puts my bagels into a bag, but first he has to look over to the manager for a go-ahead nod...
...Once he was up, we'd fight for the front seat, using actual punches and headlocks...
...If the error yields me thirty cents or so, too bad for them...
...My father would make omelets, custom-ordered, for everyone...
...The next week, another display case was gone, and the owner mournfully explained that his rent had been raised, so he and his wife were moving to California in about a month...
...The ride would take us a couple of exits west on the Long Island Expressway, just far enough for our father to drive really fast as we cheered him on, listening to Lionel Richie sing "Hello" or to any of several Billy Joel albums on tape...
...In fact, I could write a whole New York Times series on me and the coffee bar I no longer patronize, except that what I mean to complain about in this article is not the continuing incompetence of those cafe stoners, but the impending closure of Ann MeMe, the dainty, overlooked Armenian bakery where I now buy muffins and cookies for eating while I read the Sunday papers...
...Add to this another unflattering truth, that I'm a complainer...
...I can barely contain myself...
...I've employed many words to describe this situation: woeful, unjust, heartbreaking, terrible, cruel, just the kind of thing I didn't want to happen...
...Which pile I'll come back to, wondering whether the right stroke of editing might not turn it into something poignant...
...I'm a Seinfeld monologue on auto-pilot with a full tank of fuel...
...When I go into the store now, which I do only very infrequently (even though it has the best bagels for many miles around), I no longer correct the arithmetic unless the error is in their favor...
...There is hardly an inconvenience I won't turn into a small pile of words...
...Do you want anything on those bagels...
...And it was always a great meal...
...Then comes the excruciating procedure of ringing up my order, which more often than not involves some rudimentary error of arithmetic...
...All the more because my attachment to a proper Sunday morning ritual runs deep...
...And the number of words I devote to a subject may have nothing to do with its importance...
...To stay or to go...
...The clerk told me it had been sold...
...As hard as it is to find proper words to respond to a major calamity, it's no picnic either trying to correctly measure one's lament over an everyday misfortune...
...I'm sorry, what did you want...
...And I was an easy customer...
...Which always elicited the same response...
...I'd gladly tell you how much I sometimes miss those days, but that would mean filling this whole magazine with my little piles of words...
...Even in this time of big events and big themes, these two traits have me exhaustively venting my frustration over every little thing, for example the closing of my favorite bakery...
Vol. 8 • September 2002 • No. 2
