The Cheddar Chive Biscuit

It's nice that even today, among speeding SUVs, and Pepsi trucks emblazoned with the slogan "don't let a bureaucrat tell you what size drink you can buy" to campaign against Bloomberg's stand on obesity, and ads in Saturday Night Live commercial breaks for "his & her lotions" (okay, ick), there are places where the old way thrives. I am a nostalgic person, I must admit, often to the point of pining for a time I have no experience of. Oh, how those platform sneakers tantalize! I think to myself. The sweet song of that brass section on a cracked record machine is intoxicating! I must infer that somewhere out there, there is a place where community rules the marketplace and vintage flowery paper is pressed onto the walls.

There is such a place. It is a few blocks from the house I am moving into: Cafe Madeline. When the diners are done with a dish, they are expected to carry it to the end counter. Seltzer is served in screw-top bottles with Depression-era blue and white labels. A newspaper is left at an eight-seat community table for general use throughout the day, and is replaced in the morning. Best of all, the back wall is covered in vintage flowery paper, a sharp contrast to the pressed white tin of the ceiling.

This reminded me of something my dad told me. He no longer works as a special ed. teacher, but did for years on years. He says that when he was growing up, he and his sister dreamed of a school they would run together someday, a school where the best children, the one in the gifted and talented program, would be taught in the same school as the children who, whether or not they were smart, had no way to succeed in school without help: the emotionally disturbed or mentally unstable kids. A few weeks ago, my new friend K told me about a school downtown that fits the bill. The place my father had long given up on as an idea that could only belong to him and would never strike another happened to have existed all along.

There was a song we used to sing at my elementary school that goes "to everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, turn, turn." To me it always seemed like some Quaker school joke I was forced to listen to and not get as many times as my teacher A forgot he had already told it. I think I might finally be the one on the inside of the joke. For anywhere that you've always imagined, for those places that seemed to perfect to propose, there is somewhere in the world. Somewhere that houses your own dreams will spring up, and with them, your fantasies.