I ran into my stepkid at a coffee shop. Are the bonds of step-fatherhood severed by divorce? I’m still claiming him. I was nursing 2.5 cups of coffee through around 25 pages of a book, Donald Hall‘s A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety. It’s a sequel of sorts to Essays After Eighty, which I read a few years ago. Next on my list is Roger Angell’s This Old Man, published after the author had passed ninety. Hall didn’t quite make it. Angell was 101 when he died in 2022.
As time proceeds, it seems I’m more and more attracted to geriatric literature.
Stepkid had his school laptop and was going to study until it was time to meet me and his half-sister at the local spot where we have supper once a week. He mentioned that the coffee shop across the street, though in some ways superior to the one we were in, closed at 6. I already knew that and mentioned that Caffetto, on 22nd Street just west of Lyndale, is open till midnight. He already knew that. Thinking about it now, seems like maybe “nerding out in coffee shops” is determined more by nurture than nature. His genes aren’t telling him to do it, I know that. Could just be coincidence. I got my nurture and nature from the same two people, and neither one of them read books. One didn’t even drink coffee.
Our party is smaller because stepkid’s other half-sister now lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where there is a so-called university. Every reminder of her absence makes me sad, even though many of the tokens have a (thoroughly routed) pleasant aspect. The bill at the restaurant was well under a hundred dollars. I walked into her bedroom and it was neat as Van Gogh’s. It occurred to me that I hadn’t washed clothes for a couple of days and when I went to prosecute the task, the basket was just half full.
Sister of the absent girl is unafflicted. “Lydia didn’t take a lot of her clothes!” she jubilantly reports.
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