"You're a writer"
was how she began the conversation as she approached to where I was squatted at the lowest display of the magazine rack. It was a plain declaration, quietly stated without ambiguity or any hint of sarcasm - the word "writer" turned upward like a half-smile. In the instant that I was yanked from my mumbling thoughts to the world of human communication it became a statement of inarguable truth. Just as surely she could have said "you're bearded" or "you're in the library", I couldn't have argued. I, bearded, was in the library and this was a librarian defining me as a writer. Logically, she can recognize those who fill the volumes she tends: “Writer” is to “Librarian” as “Vintner” is to “Wine Merchant”, since wine bottles, like library books, are meticulously cataloged, browsed though rarely sampled, and eventually sold from a musty cellar.
For supporting evidence, the librarian cited my writing for edible Cleveland. She didn't say which of the two articles I’d published with the magazine she had read. In fact, she didn't say she had read either. Perhaps my bio with accompanying photo caught her eye on the contributor page located within a couple of bored page flips from the front cover of the complimentary quarterly. There, my name, she may have recognized from my library patronage. My face, in profile, with dark slit eyes, feigning interest in something far off or in the stimulating conversation of someone just out of the frame, with it's handlebar mustache, a subnasal cry to be recognized and remembered, perhaps 15 months later by a librarian in rural Ohio. I’m seated at a table that is not visible in the photo, my elbow resting presumptuously on the red-white checkered backing of a chair from an adjacent table. In my lap, my daughter confronts the photographer (wife/mother) with an unabashed gaze and a cafe spoon in her mouth. We are in Paris in a crowded and lively outdoor cafe setting, our first day on my first trip to France. I am enjoying a café au lait and a smug sense of worldliness. My daughter is early in the arduous process of consuming, as presented to her, a “hot chocolate”. The timeless moment of the photograph conveys endless contentment, both for the subjects of the photo and all who will experience it as the satisfyingly smooth weight of a richly-colored pebble snatched from a cool-running stream. Closely downstream from this moment, though already out of the librarian’s view, my daughter will extract the spoon from her mouth with the intention of returning it to the source of the crust already forming around the corners of her mouth. With a child’s calculation she manipulates limbs within the confine of space between daddy and chocolate, turning away from the camera while lowering her arm for the next spoonful. She thinks she is guiding the spoon, but the spoon is following the elbow, which is heading blindly to the cup. The cup, whose base is not quite settled into the confines of the circular indent of the saucer. The saucer, a suggestion of stability, is a false foundation. It’s slight concavity invites you to look beneath to the small circular rim it rests on (but you won’t until after). The saucer is a tight-rope walker with arms outstretched. And a bucket of molten chocolate on his head. The circus spectacle ends with predictable tragedy on my lap as a puddle whose extent will belie my understanding of European portion size. The conspiracy fulfilled, we return to our friend’s apartment so I can change pants.
It is in this apartment, at a tiny desk behind the louvered doors of a reading nook-turned-guest bedroom that I will begin writing for edible Cleveland, flirting with a new identity:
I am a writer
