Downtown

I drove to a conference in a city whose name began with A and found myself in a downtown square. Things were tidy and sunny, with a courthouse in the center and buildings two or three stories tall on all sides. Three larger stores had enormous display windows. The sidewalks were full of people of all colors, the women wearing hats, the men wearing jackets. One man wearing a pork pie hat was taking a picture of the courthouse. I thought he might be using a Rolleiflex but he wasn’t. I heard the film advance after he took a picture.

I noticed a soda fountain on a corner off the square. It had a large NEDICK’S sign above long streetside windows from which to serve pedestrians. I felt thirsty but shy, too shy to get a drink. To the right of the fountain, a row of brownstones stretched down the street, each with a massive reddish-brown sink attached to its front. I climbed up and walked from sink to sink before jumping down and walking back to the square.

I walked into a supermarket with three or four long, long aisles, with shelves no more than perhaps four feet high. I couldn’t find the coffee and tea, but I noticed one aisle devoted to books of upholstery samples, all opened on V-shaped platforms. They must do custom reupholstery here, I thought.

I ended up at a self-service outdoor Starbucks. The line for drinks formed next to the salad bar, and people kept cutting in to get salad and wait for coffee. I finally decided to keep my place, like a driver refusing to let other drivers merge. The cups were made of thin translucent plastic — for coffee? Two unmarked plastic containers with spigots held what looked like coffee. I took a cup and began filling it with what looked like coffee. Elaine came up behind me and said that it was tea. I dumped it into a trough below the spigots and began filling from the other spigot, but just an ounce or so of coffee came out. I dumped that too and went to a little machine, something like a remote control, to get a hundred dollars. And then we went back to the hotel.

*

“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951).

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[Possible sources: trying to recall the name of the town with a mill Elaine ordered rye flour from (A-something), a photograph of archival materials in cradles, a conversation about our first taste of Starbucks (1994?), a conversation about plasticware in restaurants, getting plastic cups for water in a restaurant, pouring leftover water into the trough of the restaurant’s soda dispenser, rebooting the Roku from the remote.]