a thursday

Any new idea gets seized and talked out of existence.*

I thought I would write about something good. Good, you say? Yes, good. I know this is a rare occurrence.

Yesterday I had one of those days that I used to have a lot, before my undergraduate career ended and I decided to start grad school (the horror, the horror) in London. This is when I took five classes a semester and worked 20 hours a week at the library. Long days these were, and I was thoroughly knackered by the time I got home. No matter how strenuous it all was -- although sometimes rather boring-- at the end of the day there was always a sense of having lived. Running from Point Park, at one end of town, to the library at the other, and on Thursday after 6:00 running back across town to university again for a three hour night class. Woke at 7:00, returned home at 10:00. I always looked forward to Thursday.

Yesterday was a Thursday. I did not think about this until now. The first song on my blog is titled "Thursday."

Yesterday was a good filling day. Woke at 8:30, at the library by 10:00, where I no longer work as a paid employee but a volunteer. Really the only reason I work there is, well there are two reasons: (1) I need something to do with myself that gets me out of my house, (2) I really like the people there. I have made some good friends and acquaintances. It was always less a job, then a nice place to hang out -- making money in the mean time. Now right here my former writing professor would very much like me to write about these people, describing them, explaining my relationship to them. But I'm not going to. Mostly because I don't want to spend the time doing it. And because I need not have some of these people finding my blog and disapproving of what I write, or thinking too well of themselves -- or my relationship with them -- according to what I write. Short of it is, that with each person there, even the oldest, most up-tight librarian, I have forged some sort of relationship, and for someone who finds it difficult to get along with people, this is quite an accomplishment. Mostly, I have fun, I have a larf, as the Brits say. And no where else do I feel less inhibited.

On Thursday (I work at the library Tuesday and Thursday) I have lunch with T. We usually go to Brueggers. He likes soup. So he usually gets that. I, a salad and a chicken soup that remains one of my favourite downtown meals. T. is sick with a throat cold of some sort, so I bought lunch for him, after suggesting he get the chicken soup that I always get, but which he has never.

My life is certainly not very exciting. It has always been the little things, that perhaps other people don't recognize, that inspire me. So, uncharacteristically for some perhaps, for me, leaving work and heading to a cafe to read for two hours, filled me with joy. It is how I spent most days in London, a city where a cafe -- and its counter, the pub -- are considered two very important entities, like a second home. We have our Starbucks here where we grab our coffee before rushing off to work but in Europe the cafe is a place where you stay for hours, talking to others, or reading.

But I go off on tangents, and am starting to sound more romantic than I mean be.

I had bought tickets to see a play with a friend, and so after spending time at the cafe in his neighbourhood, I headed to his house at 6:00 in the evening. We walked to a French bistro, also in the area, and had dinner on an outdoor patio. It was -- as D. suggested it would be -- "cute" in its desire to appear genuinely french, with Edith Piaf music playing over the speakers, and old french adverts, like the one at the top of this blog. The food, in looks at least, genuinely french; desserts with flaky crust.

For some reason the waitress took an awful long time to change our money and we left the restaurant with a half an hour to get to the theatre. I did not much care if we arrived late, uncharacteristically for me. Usually I am at the theatre at least a half an hour before the show starts. Maybe my time at the cafe and then the french bistro had slipped me back into the European mind-set. Some call this mind-set lazy, they prefer to see it as laid-back. As with most varying assessments, it is usually both.

We walked more quickly to D.'s home than we had walked to the Bistro, and after a quick visit to the loo for D. and after grabbing my Strand Bookshop bag holding sundry items from the library, we drove to the theatre with fifteen minutes or not much less to spare. It began to rain just as we got out of the car. I fiddled unsuccessfully against the wind with my purse-sized umbrella, until D. took over to steady it, at which exact moment it was decided that there would be no more rain.

The Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre is where we saw The History Boys, a play that (probably) won a Tony, and had with it a very successful run at the National Theatre in London. A play about a group of High School boys in the 1980's, the year of their A-levels, and their endeavour to get into Oxford and Cambridge for college, and the one professor who teaches them that getting into a good university is not the ne plus ultra of life.

Before the play began D. spotted his best friend who, oddly enough, was sitting at the very end of our row, of which we were at the opposite end. Although they often talk to one another, neither one had told the other that they were going to be at this play on this day. Coincidence, I'm sure, but still a wonderfully odd occurrence. Such circumstances always have with it, for me, a sort of mystical resonance.

There was even a scene entirely spoken in French, that was rather piquant given where we had dinner. And on the wall of the stage classroom there was a poster from the movie Casablanca, which I had only two days before tried to encourage D. to watch -- unsuccessfully, however, as my assessment that D. reminds me of a modern Humphrey Bogart was not enough to convince him to watch an "old" movie.

No rain as we walked to the car after the show, although it looked as though it had rained during the show. Home by 11:00, sleep by 1:00, 11:00 am the next day I woke, having just the same sort of uninterrupted, refreshing sleep I used to have on a Thursday night after a week of classes.

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*A Modern Comedy, John Galsworthy